ARMAGH broke early from the pre-match parade just as it came around from Hill 16 towards the Hogan Stand, heading into a huddle at the sideline.
Their talking was all done by then. No real need for it. So beyond a few words from Kieran McGeeney, they kind of just stood there, looking as though they were taking it in.
The whole thing was a last-minute construct.
Right at the very end of the warm-up, Blaine Hughes and Joe McElroy ran across each other’s path and collided.
Hughes hurt his right knee. His kicking leg.
It happened moments before the players lined up at the red carpet to shake hands with President Higgins. They had to find some way to assess it. So they broke early to get to the sideline and buy the physios 30 seconds to strap Hughes.
It was a bad enough knock that they had Ethan Rafferty primed and ready to go.
The Carrickcruppen man emerged with tape around the knee. He got through it but was limping rightly around the Carrickdale on Monday.
Galway’s press didn’t test it the way they might have.
Of his nine first-half kickouts, Hughes took four off his left foot and went long only once.
If the injury hadn’t been dealt with so subtly that almost nobody in the stadium noticed it, perhaps Galway go after him and it all breaks down.
But they did their work quietly, without fuss. That became one of their hallmarks.
The Armagh jerseys for Sunday’s game had none of the traditional All-Ireland final insignia beneath the crest to mark the occasion.
They wore the same set of jerseys they had all year.
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Keeping things as normal and routine as possible has become one of the hallmarks of trying to manage the occasion of a final.
It’s notable that Kilcoo never had anything special printed on their jerseys in the years Conleith Gilligan was involved, and that with Ciaran McKeever involved Cullyhanna chose not to mark their All-Ireland intermediate final with any inscription either where others have.
Not that there’s a right and wrong or that a few letters on a jersey matter.
It’s just about retaining the sense of normality, that this was just another game to be played and won.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
KIERAN McGeeney has done his level best to actively avoid the limelight in recent years.
Every way the light danced in search of him, he stepped back out of it.
Prior to this year it had become routine that he would only talk to the media when Armagh were beaten.
If they won, out would come McKeever or Kieran Donaghy to smash the softballs.
But if they were beaten, McGeeney would step forward himself in anticipation that the questions would be tougher.
In that small act, you get a sense of the selflessness that he has brought to Armagh’s pursuit of this.
There was a great quote during the week that I just can’t recall the source of and am paraphrasing slightly, but it was basically: “He never asked anyone to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself. Problem was that there was nothing he wouldn’t do.”
Geezer was telling players when they were still in Division Three that they would win an All-Ireland if they stayed at it.
Schools, club minors, senior club when Crossmaglen’s provincial stranglehold loosened, county minors, U21s, seniors – none of the traditional building blocks of an All-Ireland winning team were there.
But he still believed they would do it.
From the first moment he thought he would win an All-Ireland as a player until he achieved, it took a full decade.
He had been a county minor in 1988, made his senior league debut in ‘89 when Paddy Moriarty threw him on at corner-forward down in Kerry. It took even McGeeney another three years before he made his senior championship debut in ‘92.
Their summer was over but the minors had reached the All-Ireland final, where they would face Meath.
In a bid to toughen the minors up a bit, a challenge game was arranged against a senior select.
Before it began, Brother Ennis told him he’d be on this young lad Diarmuid Marsden and that McGeeney was to soften him up a bit but not go tearing into the lad.
“I couldn’t catch him, he was unreal, and he was built like a tank,” McGeeney recalled in a rare 2020 interview on Comhra le Tomás.
He recalled talking to Paul McGrane that night in the Regency Hotel in Dublin about winning an All-Ireland. The pair of them met a group of the minor team on the Monday night and then went to Diarmuid Marsden’s house in Lurgan later in the week and took him out for a pint too.
His leadership style was direct and powerful. If there was any chance of an omelette, he was more than happy breaking eggs.
But the great misconception around him is that he is so forceful that it was his way or no way.
McGeeney has never looked to place Yes Men around himself. He has always actively sought the opposite.
Speaking at the Carrickdale Hotel yesterday in the afterglow, Kieran Donaghy recalled nights when he’d pull out of their training base in Callanbridge having spent the guts of an hour arguing over selections.
A huge part of the debate in those meetings would have centred not so much around the starting fifteen but who would make the 26 and who wouldn’t. They would get lively and heated and argumentative and then it was done. Squad picked, on we go. Rinse and repeat over months of a season.
The day Armagh beat Kerry, a tweet popped up on my timeline that was a list of names of the clubs and individuals that had voted to relieve McGeeney of his duties in Kildare.
Those people broke Kildare football because they refused to listen to the players.
They ignored the express wishes of the men most greatly affected and ploughed on to sack him.
Armagh people must be thanking their lucky stars this morning that the people in the room faced with that exact same decision last winter opened their ears.
There is nowhere more cynical on this earth than a GAA changing room.
For the first five years, they didn’t win an Ulster Championship match. They bounced up and down from Division Three, squandered chances to get out of it.
The idea that it was simply loyalty to his name or his reputation as a player never stood up to scrutiny.
That will buy you six months or a year at best. Nobody gets five years as an inter-county manager because of what they did as a player.
But the discord in Armagh was all supporters unhappy with the style of play or what have you. There has never been any air from inside of the players turning against the setup.
We cannot stand here and say that it was ever obvious Armagh were going to reach their destination. It wasn’t.
Hands up. In all of their big games this year, against Donegal, Derry, Kerry and Galway, this columnist tipped Armagh’s opposition to win.
I can only hope the people that employ me exhibit the same patience as those that kept faith with McGeeney.
What had become clear going back a few years, though, is that that wherever they were going to end up, their best chance of doing anything was with him in charge.
Because ultimately, as Eamonn Coleman once famously said, “the players is the men”.
And the players in Armagh absolutely love Kieran McGeeney.
They would do anything for him, and he for them.
That is not a new phenomenon just because they’ve won something now.
It would have been so easy for them to push against him at any point over an entire decade. Down tools. Leave. Give up.
Joe Brolly famously labelled inter-county footballers as “indentured slaves” to football.
McGeeney has always railed against that characterisation, pointing out to his players how Olympic athletes train under the same banner of semi-amateurism.
Their approach to training is deeply scientific.
Julie Davis, their strength and conditioning coach, has overseen the physical transformation of the players’ bodies over a long period of time. It is carefully managed.
In the busiest part of the season where games were coming thick and fast, there were times when Armagh only trained on the pitch once a week.
Their sessions are pre-programmed in terms of the load players will bear each night and it is strictly adhered to, right down to the minute.
Nothing that other counties aren’t doing but it rails against the notion that McGeeney is flogging the life out of them.
He’s helped so many of them off the field, in more ways than you can ever imagine. He is their friend and their confidant.
McGeeney adapted and altered his backroom teams. Conleith Gilligan added a bounce this year, his influence evident in their faster transition play. Ciaran McKeever has built their defensive platform over years. Kieran Donaghy’s one night a week up the road was invaluable.
That is the stuff that makes players stay about and dedicate themselves to it even when trophies and medals are scarce.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
TAKE when Tyrone annihilated them in an All-Ireland quarter-final seven years ago. Sewed it into them. 3-17 to 0-8.
It was like a horror movie.
Of the 21 players they used, 12 were still part of the panel this year.
From the other nine, four have retired, James Morgan was injured and Jamie Clarke’s passport couldn’t sit still in a drawer.
Just three have fallen by the wayside.
Those are not numbers that tally with the idea that McGeeney was somehow holding them back.
He had always told them they would win an All-Ireland.
It needed for them to take Mayo to the well in a qualifier five years ago for the players to really take ownership of the dream.
That game was no sooner over than the county board have given him backing to continue but he took the winter.
Each year, the players were asked if they were happy for him to continue. And he’d have been disappointed if they weren’t and hadn’t said so because it could be a tough environment.
He gave them honesty, to the point of brutality if he had to, and expected it back because that’s the only way it works.
They were scoffed at in some quarters for this statistic that they hadn’t been beaten in a championship game since 2021 but it became such an important part of psyche.
Derided as the team that couldn’t win a tight game, the public perception changed somewhere along the line.
Last week, they suddenly became the team that people couldn’t see losing.
That fed into the whole county’s confidence around them, underpinned by a starlit subs bench that if not quite happy in their roles had accepted the importance of what they were being asked to bring.
But within the not losing, they recognised that they couldn’t absolve themselves of blame for not winning either.
Discipline became a huge focus this year.
They paid particular attention to the end of last year’s Ulster final.
Armagh had led by two points with three minutes of extra-time to play. In the very heat of battle, they gave away two cheap frees.
That can happen. But on the second one, they barged Shane McGuigan about a bit after the foul. The referee punished them by bringing the ball from the 65′ to just outside the 45′. McGuigan pointed it from there, and Derry would go on to win on penalties.
Conceding frees they could just about live with but the dissent had to stop. So they preached every night that when you’re fouled, leave the ball down and move away.
They’d earned a reputation as being overly aggressive as a team. Whether it was deserved or not, it existed and had to be dealt with.
Armagh didn’t receive a single red or black card in league or championship in 2024.
There were 69 minutes gone yesterday when Aaron McKay received the game’s first booking, for very little.
If anything indicated the difference from last year to this, though, it was in the immediate aftermath of McKay’s goal.
Croke Park was in overdrive. You couldn’t hear, you couldn’t see, you couldn’t think. Ripe conditions for breeding indiscipline.
The ball runs away from Cein D’Arcy but he’s still favourite ahead of Rory Grugan and Rian O’Neill.
He takes a touch with his foot and then bends to pick it up. There’s such temptation in the fever of that atmosphere to put on a tackle. But D’Arcy is on the endline going nowhere, and Grugan and O’Neill resist. They stand up, shepherd him towards the line, refuse to give up the free.
Galway scored two points from frees, one of which came off Blaine Hughes’s botched first attempt at a kickout with the newly-bad knee. They missed another couple but the fouls were committed in areas that tempted Shane Walsh into kicking from outside his range.
It isn’t that Armagh were suddenly so much more disciplined than everyone else.
Conor Turbitt missed the only really scoreable free that Galway conceded in the game.
They’re simply more disciplined than their 2023 selves.
Because a lot of it became a battle with themselves and their own mindset. Fixing the fixable.
McGeeney talks a lot about the Spartan code of how your shield is to protect the person to your left, not you.
He talks about the jersey, how other teams like Kilkenny or Kerry or the All Blacks are defined by their colours and how he wanted to change how Armagh viewed theirs in the past.
“It’s in the smaller team trying to make the breakthrough that the superstar becomes bigger than the jersey,” he told Tomás Ó Sé in that podcast four years ago.
After thirty-six unbroken years in inter-county football, he joins an elite group of men to have captained and managed teams to Sam Maguire.
Twice it has taken him a full decade of believing he would win an All-Ireland to achieve it.
They talked a lot this week about trusting each other that they would do their job.
That extended to the players’ trust that management would get it right tactically. They made changes that paid off.
Dropping Peter McGrane felt cruel but Connaire Mackin’s height instantly cut off the threat of Matthew Tierney’s goal-hanging habit that Donegal were caught out by. They moved Oisin Conaty to the other wing to try and punish Sean Mulkerrin’s habit of wanting to drop off and sweep. It worked to a tee.
Aidan Forker on Damien Comer, worked to a tee.
Their pseudo kickout press, where they’d test Conor Gleeson’s nerve by pushing a man less into the forward line but only leaving him a left-footed out-ball forced him long into a wall where Armagh then were able to leave four men out the back and outnumber Galway.
On the biggest day, it all worked.
It has taken everyone else a long time to trust Kieran McGeeney as a manager.
Always take your lead from the players.
The players know.
The players is the men.
