By Shaun Casey

FOR the first time in 35 years, Cremartin are playing in the Senior Championship, and they get their campaign up and running with an away trip to Corduff on Saturday afternoon.

Last year’s Division Two league winners have enjoyed the step up to senior, where they finished eighth and retained their spot with a relegation play-off victory over Killanny.

Now they begin the business end of the season against a familiar foe, who they know all about.

“We didn’t play Corduff last year obviously, they were senior, and we were intermediate,” recalls Cremartin boss Matthew Lambe.

“But the year before we played them three times, they were in our group in the championship and then we played them in the league semi-final. They beat us by one point twice and maybe three points in the league semi-final and we got off to a bad start that day.

“We felt in each of those games that we could have won and maybe should have won, and this weekend will be no different. I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot in it, I don’t believe we’ll be that far away.

“We’ll get nothing easy; it’ll be tough, it’ll be physical, and we’ll just have to embrace it. Corduff will probably see us as the weakest team in the group and they have big aspirations of winning the championship after how they did last year.”

The group as a whole is extremely tough as Cremartin will also come up against the two most recent winners of the Mick Duffy Cup in Scotstown and Ballybay along with Aughnamullen, who reached the last eight of the competition last year.

“It’s tough butlook at the other side of the draw, there’s no gimmes on that side of the draw either. We played Scotstown at home earlier on in the year and they had a number of county men missing but we had a number of men missing too.

“They beat us with the last kick of the game, and I think that gave us an awful lot of belief. We still hadn’t won a game at that stage and that game gave us the belief that we can improve, and we walked away thinking should have won that game.”

Stephen Mooney made his Monaghan senior debut this season and the talented youngster is one of the top sharpshooters in the county. Former Dublin All-Ireland winner Kevin Nolan captains the side and he’s still doing the business for Lambe’s men.

Niall Flanagan will miss out for the remainder of the season through injury and while the likes of Ciarán Brannigan and Ryan McVicar won’t be fit for this weekend, they will contest a place in the starting line-up over the next few rounds.

“We have a squad of 30 men there and there’s still 27 of them available for selection at the weekend,” added Lambe. “That’s a bit of a head scratch to do between now and the weekend but that’s what we’re here for.”