Ciarán McManus played 159 League and Championship games for Offaly over the course of a 16-year career.
Outside of that, there was a smattering of O’Byrne Cup games, any amount of challenge matches - and then there was a solitary appearance in the Tommy Murphy Cup in 2007 that he still reflects on now with a degree of embarrassment.
Offaly had reached the Leinster final the year before and were swamped by Dublin in the closing minutes having had a man sent off, but they had a reasonable team and prospects of development.
They got careless during the League the following year, however. With the competition being revamped into its current format, they managed to slip into Division Four.
That year, the bottom eight League teams were barred from the qualifiers unless they reached a provincial final and when Offaly fell to Dublin in the Leinster semi-final, that was it - they were bound for Wicklow in the first round of the Tommy Murphy Cup.
“I’ll tell you truthfully,” says McManus, “and no disrespect to all the teams that were there but, wearing the Offaly jersey, I felt embarrassed to be playing in it.
“I don’t think we prepared very well for the game and we were well up and we somehow conceived to lose it then but I think that was our attitude in general. It was a bit of we didn’t want to be there sort of thing, we’ve let ourselves down, let the county down sort of a feeling to be in that Championship. That’s the way I felt.
“Of all the games I ever played in, I remember that day. I wanted to win, obviously, but it felt like ‘thank God that’s over and now I want to make amends next year and get back to where we should be’. That’s the way it felt.”
For the first time since, League placing influences what counties’ Championship campaigns look like once again except now it’s the Tailteann Cup, which will swallow up teams in the bottom two divisions.
Offaly have a dice with Cork in Tullamore tomorrow to avoid the drop to Division Three in what is arguably the biggest game of the weekend and while attitudes to a second tier competition have softened in places over the last 15 years, McManus still has his doubts.
“It (staying up) will help the development of not just the team but games within the county, keeping the higher profile, the higher divisions. And, of course, the Championship then.
“Staying in the top 16 in the first year would be a great achievement for this team and not to be relegated into that, what’s the name of the cup? The Tailteann Cup is it?
“Even that, not even remembering what the name of that cup is just shows it just doesn’t appeal to me, this second tier Championship.
“We have to be realistic about where we are and it seems to be more acceptable now that there is a two-tier Championship and people want to see their counties playing longer into the summer and more games so, lookit, it remains to be seen to be honest. I’ll sit on the fence on that one.”
While McManus says that relegation “wouldn’t be the end of the world”, he is optimistic as to what the future holds either way.
“The county board have done great work trying to build the grassroots again and the foundation.
“Now we have to see where the gap is between the youth system getting through to senior. This is going to be the acid test now, whether we can build on that momentum and pull them through to senior.
“You couldn’t be but positive because with the relative successes that we’ve had in the last number of years - if you couldn’t be positive about that there’s something wrong.”
For now, he has reservations about how the senior team sets itself up, with the alarming defeat to Roscommon last weekend the latest example - but they’re certainly not without hope tomorrow.
“There seems to be a pain there for how bad it went last week and maybe that plus the prize of a home game against Cork, it’s still in their own hands and you couldn’t ask for much more.
“I think at the start of the League if we said we were going to be in with a shout at the end of staying up in our own hands we would have taken that, so how optimistic am I? I’m more nervous than optimistic.”
