Respected football mentor Brendan McNally had other more attractive offers put on the table in front of him. But he chose to throw in his hat with rookie club Fergal O'Hanlons for the coming year. He spoke to Kevin Carney before embarking. Brendan McNally aims to succeed. But the incoming Fergal O'Hanlons' boss accepts anything short of a spirited sleeves-rolled-up in the coming season will not suffice. McNally, the club's junior team supremo, believes the club's top players are ready, willing and able to go head to head with the best junior sides in the county in '06. However the Glaslough-born mentor is nothing if not a realist and he reckons that in 2006, it'll very much a case of the O'Hanlons participating in a game of survival. "This is still a whole new departure for everyone involved with the club and what we're talking about here is survival and generating football for the players at the club. "The players at Fergal O'Hanlons have as much right to play Gaelic football as anyone and they've a right to be given a fair chance and an opportunity to be on a team." The coming year won't be an entirely new experience for Brendan though as he was involved with the embryonic GAA outfit for a period, as manager, at the end of the year. And from what he gleaned of the nature of the players on board the rookie club at that stage and from what he has learned since, he believes there is material to work with. "I think sufficient interest is there among the players and more of the young fellas are starting to show their face at adult level now too. "The numbers seem to be there and if we can bring on even more of the young fellas, then you're talking about having a decent enough panel. "The thing is, Fergal O'Hanlons has to be applauded for reaching out to parts of Monaghan town that mightn't have been catered for before they came about. "I've no doubt the Harps were doing their best and were doing a very good job but I think everyone was aware that there was a surplus of players in the town. "Fergal O'Hanlons are giving fellas who might have gone to other sports a chance to get a game on a Gaelic football team and that can only be good for Monaghan GAA." The underage seeds sewn at the fledgling county town-based club offer a long-term future for Fergal O'Hanlons but Brendan's business is about the here and now. He is concerned with consolidating the progress shown by the club's adult team in 2004 when it, unlike some more established clubs, fulfilled all its fixtures for the season. "The club can feel proud of its efforts in 2004 but its next aim has to be the winning of some games and maintaining the good disciplinary record that it forged last year. "There's no reason why the trend can't continue whereby you had the junior team being beaten all ends up in 2003 but then getting closer on the scoreboard in 2004. "In 2005, instead of hidings in the region of 40 points, the team was losing out by just a handful of points at times," the two-times Hackett Cup winner explains. Brendan is pretty sure that the Fergal O'Hanlons club can count on a fair amount of goodwill from the rest of the clubs of the county but he understands that's not enough on its own to ensure the survival/development of the fledgling GAA crew. Despite the fact that he's a so-called 'outsider', it's clear that Brendan is very much a soul mate of the die-hards who are the inspiration and the drivers of the club. "I hope that the club will never go backwards and that those whose dream it was to set up the club find their place in the sun because they deserve to." The 'erstwhile Emyvale intermediate team-manager was initially encouraged to put his finger in the O'Hanlons' pie by employee and O'Hanlons' player Eanna O'Leary. It was February last when Brendan first came on board the Good Ship O'Hanlons when, as trainer, he put his level one and level two coaching credentials to good use. What were his initial impressions of the players he inherited back then and of the novel club itself? "I thought the players were very willing to learn and very honest in their approach to the training and the matches which is a solid foundation straight away. "I have to be honest and say that their skill levels weren't the best but that was understandable given the fact a lot of them had been without football for quite a while. "Very few of the players had a grounding in underage football and that meant you had to do that bit more in training on the basic skills than you'd normally have to do "But it was fairly obvious that the team had character and the ambition to go forward and that's a fair bit to build on for any trainer or manager. "There's a good team of workers working behind the scenes to keep the necessary support structures in place and they have to be applauded too for their commitment. "I have to admire the officers and the players for their resilience because it can't have been easy to come back each time the club was on the end of a hammering. "They've had to swallow a lot of medicine but I haven't seen a more resilient bunch; they've great pride in what they're about, that's for sure." With talent on tap such as Dermot and Ronan McKenna plus Willie Cawley and the aforementioned O'Leary, gung-ho McNally seems to have the core of a fine side. With a couple of seasons behind it now at adult level, one wonders has the club gained the respect of its peers and is there a real credibility factor in place? "I hope the club is past the point of being made a joke of or being the object of ridicule because, after all, Fergal O'Hanlons is a club in its own right and deserves to survive "Numbers have gone up and down since the club's formation but I'd like to see the players who were the first batch of underage players coming through this year at junior. "The more young talent that can be tapped in, the better for the junior team, the better for the club as a whole," the one-time Penrith Gaels (Sydney) clubman explains. Sarah Moen, who enjoyed success in training the Monaghan and Armagh ladies teams in New York in recent years, will assist Brendan in training the O'Hanlons in '06. So what is the duo's goal for the coming year? What would Brendan, for one, deem as being a successful year? "I'd like to see the juniors pull themselves clear off the floor of the table and win four or five league games and maybe win at least one championship match. "In that respect, a lot depends on maybe injuries that we might pick up during the league and what kind of draw we get in the championship." Brendan confesses that he's looking forward to the challenge of steering Fergal O'Hanlons to richer pastures and a new status among their peers. The former Kerley and Treanor Cup medallist with Emyvale isn't prepared to set low horizons and insists his declared targets for the coming year are realistic ones. "I see no sense in lowering our horizons and setting targets which aren't ambitious and which aren't going to test us to the limit. "We're not fools. We're the lowest ranked club in the county and Monaghan football isn't ranked too highly in the country either so we know the base we're starting from." Brendan believes that no stone will be left unturned by all concerned at Fergal O'Hanlons in a bid to make definite progress in the coming year. He's uplifted by thoughts of the club having its own playing pitch and dressing rooms in the not too distant future with the county board ground at Mullaghdun in question. "A new club has a lot of problems to overcome and it can't have helped to have had no home and having to play all your games away from home. "But the prospect of having a 'home' ground and dressing-room facilities is something everyone, especially the players, are looking forward to. "I feel that the acquisition of the facility at Mullaghdun will greatly help secure the long-term future of the club. "And if the club can continue to pull in the numbers at underage to provide a lifeblood, then things could really happen for Fergal O'Hanlons in the next few years." Beir an bua! Tweet

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