The legendary Benny Mone
December 30, 2010Those of a certain vintage will not have seen Benny Mone play football. His peers will tell you though that he was the kind of player who could put bums on seats and get feet stomping.
The 72 year old former Clontibret, Monaghan and Ulster star was a crowd puller par excellence, team-mates and adversaries declare in unison.
The late Charlie Gallagher of Cavan and Ulster fame unhesitatingly fingered Mone as his most difficult opponent and that is saying something considering the fact that the sadly departed Cootehill Celtic clubman was regularly one of the top scorers in the country during the sixties.
The aforementioned Gallagher was born on Christmas Day. Co-incidentally, Mone was born just a week earlier.
Honoured at the Monaghan County Convention by being elevated to the position of Vice-President of the county board, Benny still talks as good a game as he once played it.
The recent Hall of Fame winner frequently attends Clontibret matches and follows Monaghan religiously too. He is a mine of views on the modern game and modern teams.
For the past 47 years he has been residing in Middletown, county Armagh where his late wife Nuala (nee McGuigan) hailed from and from where they raised their two children, Brendan and Marie.
For 49 years, the former great worked for Monaghan Bottlers, his "second and last job" after cutting his teeth in the workforce way back yonder as a bar tender in the Westenra Hotel, Monaghan town.
These days, one might not expect long days on the road replenishing pubs' and hotels' stock of drink as particularly convenient for a top class footballer but our man Mone says he took it all in his stride.
"The way it was then was we tied the work around the football. The runs on the lorry were arranged around the football. My boss James McManus was very accomodating in that way."
On the county front, Benny had a great innings but without the silverware to show for it. He played for the seniors for 15 years but won nothing.
"Let's put it this way, I didn't have to go looking for a carrier bag to hold all the medals I collected over the years," he quips.
But like his fellow clubmen of his time and beforehand, men like John Rice, Hughie McKearney, Francie McQuaid and Sean Woods, the bold Benny was good enough nonetheless to win a Railway Cup medal as a tigerish right-half back in 1960/61.
His speed off the mark, his sense of anticipation and his ability to read a game plus his vision made him a player to be reckoned with.
At a fighting fit weight of 13 stone 10 pounds and touching 5'10" - "I would have shrunk a bit since" - the young Mone was a 'thou shalt not pass' type defender who performed at his best when faced with the biggest challenges.
"The bigger the profile the player had the more I enjoyed the game and probably the better I played. I think it came from preparing better for the bigger challenge.
"If I was coming up against Charlie Gallagher or Paddy Doherty (Down), I'd put on my thinking cap and concentrate on what I had to do 'cause nobody can really tell you how to handle anyone.
"When you knew you were coming up against a player you knew nothing about, you weren't up for the match as much and you could get the runaround even though I always kept myself in good shape."
Benny was renowned for maintaining his fitness levels, mostly by training on his own by dint of the absence of collective county training at that time.
Such was the way of things back in the late 'fifties and sixties, Mone and co. on the county front didn't get together that often.
"We very seldom came together for collective training and only met up a couple of weeks before the first championship match.
"There was very little coaching anyway at that time, at any level, and there was nowhere near the sort of attention given to players then that you see given to players nowadays.
"It was nearly always up to yourselve or the club to get to a certain match unless it was a long distance away and cars were organised.
"That wasn't just the case for Monaghan; it was the same sort of thing for a lot of the other counties as well - there was very little organisation all-round."
Surprisingly, Benny maintains there was very little team spirit, all-round, in the Monaghan camp either side of the start of the onset of the sixties.
The lack of get-togethers, and attendent dearth in preparation plus an over-emphasis on the club scene made for a lack-lustre approach by some when it came to playing for the county team, he moots.
"I think there was a bit of team spirit lacking with Monaghan in those years. It was light years different from the club scene.
"County players were only meeting up when playing against each other for their clubs; there was little or no communication between the players outside of those games.
"Maybe that was par for the course in other counties, I don't know. We had some of the best footballers in the country but too many on the team played as individuals and that didn't help us in taking on the Cavan and Downs of this world."
Cavan were the 'main' team in Ulster during his time as a senior county footballer, Benny testifies, and when the Breffni blues weren't in their pomp, the Mourne County invariably left Monaghan weeping.
"The Down teams of the early sixties were great. They had everything going for themselves, especially when Paddy Doherty came back from Scotland and took his place alongside Sean O'Neill in the forward line. They were a real team and the players played for each other."
Amazingly, Benny never did get to play in an Ulster senior championship final. It's a statistic that puts into perspective the angst of not having won a McKenna Cup, league or championship gong in his 15 seasons with Monaghan's seniors.
For all his travails in trying to climb into the winner's enclosure at intercounty level, Benny says he thoroughly enjoyed his time pitting his defensive skills against some of the most talented players in the province and further afield.
He was known to be as tough as whalebone and revelled in 'mixing it'. The type of football played during his era suited him to a tee.
Life insurance policies must have been in big demand by forwards in those days considering how much physical stuff was let go by refs?
"Let's put it this way, it was hard for a team to go down to 14 men," he jokes. "Luckily I was hardly ever caught in the act."
Whatever about the scary type of football that dominated the domestic football landscape in Monaghan in the fifties and sixties, Benny did at least counter his barren days on the county front by collecting four SFC medals for his troubles.
The first of his blue riband medals arrived in 1955, a great year for the O'Neills. The Armagh-border side not only won the senior championship title but also the Owen Ward Cup.
Benny remembers Pat Clarke's clinching goal. And, of the 1956 championship final, he recalls how corner forward Sean Duffy scored the winning goal with just four minutes to go which served to sink Ballybay by 3-8 to 3-6 and earn the O'Neills the club's sixth senior championship final success.
In 1957 it took two memorable meetings between Clontibret and Ballybay before the latter relieved Clontibret of the title but the following year Clontibret defeated Donaghmoyne by 0-7 to 0-4 in a tough, hard hitting final.
Club historians talk of how their charges could have won much more comfortably but for faulty finishing. Clontibret had already beaten Threemilehouse and Monaghan Harps in the 1958 when his move to midfield during the subsequent final proved to be an inspired one.
Sadly Benny finds little of the inspirational kind about a lot of matches he attends these days.
"When it's played well, its good but when it's bad, it's terrible," Benny says of the modern game.
Of the county team's ongoing attempt to regain the Anglo-Celt Cup, he believes that it's high time Dame Fortune gave the Oriel the eye.
He says Eamonn McEneaney's charges will need to get a helping hand from Lady Luck if they are to win capture the Ulster SFC title this year ahead of the claims of the O'Neill County although "Tyrone are going down the ladder and aren't as good as they were."
On the local front, not surprisingly he fingers Clontibret as the likely winners of the Mick Duffy Cup this year.
"I didn't expect Clontibret to win the senior championship in 2010 so what would I know." Tweet
