The master of mind games and the master of corner forwards aplenty.
They say let your actions do the talking and Ryan McMenamin’s actions certainly did some talking on the pitch, but he wasn’t afraid either to just, you know… talk.
Ricey was famed for his ability to annoy and to rattle opposition players – besides from being a downright quality footballer too – and he described how even the smallest of things could help to put a player off his game when he appeared on The GAA Hour football show on Thursday.
With Colm Parkinson and Steven McDonnell both prepared for the McMenamin onslaught when the pair faced the Tyrone man in their playing days, neither received much lip or sledging so they put the question to him plain and simply: why the hell not?
Wooly told McMenamin that Donegal legend Brendan Devenney once said the defender never shut up when they came face to face but the three-time All-Ireland winner said there was no master plan, just that with some players, “you can rattle them.”
With Devenney, he just wanted to put him under pressure because he was the Donegal free-taker too.
“Once a forward (Devenney) comes back and tells you that he never missed a free the year before, you kind of say to yourself, ‘I can make hay with this boy here’,” the Dromore native said in a brilliant interview on The GAA Hour.
“He spent more time wondering what I was going to say and I was gone up the field more times and when he was coming back answering me with something that I never asked him, I was thinking that’s a good way to have a man.”
McMenamin was a clever operator, and in a game defined by inches, he targeted these inches and drew advantages from the most minute signs of weakness in his opposing number’s mentality.
He had such a reputation carved out for himself for this self-proclaimed ‘banter’ that opposing players such as Stevie McDonnell were left wondering what was going on when the Tyrone back kept his mouth shut and said nothing to them.
Speaking about how he’d choose who to challenge with these verbals (or banter), McMenamin said:
“I had it in my head that Stevie is probably expecting me to come out with it, full verbals.
“I said I’ll come out, throw him and just say nothing to him and I think that’s what I did, I think Stevie was even trying to get a bit of banter out of me then.”
Listen to the full McMenamin interview below and the exchanges between him, Wooly and McDonnell (from 11:30) below or listen here on iTunes.
A breakdown of Thursday’s GAA Hour football show.
1:00: The lads wax lyrical about Colm Cooper’s legacy in the game after his retirement.
11:30: Ryan McMenamin joins to about marking the Gooch and “banter” on the field with his markers.
24:15: Paul Galvin tells a story about Cooper sleeping until 1.15pm with the All-Ireland final against Cork at 3.30pm.
27:20: Eamonn Fitzmaurice defends his team against allegations of Kerry ignoring traditional values and emphasizes Dublin’s ‘hard edge’ with an explosive press conference.
41:15: Banty ‘The Wily Old Fox’ talking up Westmeath and other manager mind games.
46:30: The lads assess their league predictions from the beginning of the league and it doesn’t make for great reading.
57:30: Stevie McDonnell on free taking.
59:10: Wooly’s admiration for Oisín McConville’s cooking skills.
1:00:00: Predictions for the weekend’s league finals.
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