‘I write down my wife’s name and my daughter’s name – Orla and Clodagh. I write down Mum and dad. Underline them. I’ve got those things. Job done. Ready to go!’ – Paddy Burns’s diary
…
SIX minutes of stoppage-time. Six minutes of pure anarchy and stress. Armagh are a point up.
Galway substitute ‘Tomo’ Culhane is only on the field a few minutes and he’s haring all over the place.
Paddy Burns hasn’t cramped all year – but in the dying throes of the 2024 All-Ireland final in Croke Park, he’s cramping up.
“Culhane is flying, he’s fresh. He’s getting a yard on me, but they aren’t giving him the ball. I’m delighted they aren’t.
“But if they give him it, I just have to be there. He won’t stop moving. I’m running around after him, thinking: ‘Don’t let him be the one to get the score.’ It can be a scary place sometimes. Everything’s going through your head,” Burns says.
The Forkhill native has been close to immaculate at corner-back all season for Armagh. But these six minutes will define absolutely everything and everybody in the most arbitrary way imaginable.
Burns is cursing referee Sean Hurson for signalling six minutes of stoppage-time. That’s 360 seconds – an eternity in Gaelic football time.
Worse still, Hurson will end up playing seven minutes.
“You know what, Sean is a lovely fella. Some referees treat you like a child on the pitch, but Sean speaks to you like a man and speaks to you with respect. But I was hating Sean at that point.”
In the maelstrom, Rory Grugan doesn’t escape his team-mate’s wrath either.
“Rory had been down injured and that’s what’s caused this extra time. ‘Frig you, Rory – could you not have just crawled off the pitch?’”
Wild, random thoughts invade Burns’s head space.
He can still hear James Morgan saying: ‘I don’t want to be part of an Armagh team that never wins anything’ – words uttered by the Crossmaglen man after the side’s penalty shoot-out heartache against Donegal in Clones on May 12.
Sometimes your strongest steel is forged in fire.
“And I was hating Rian [O’Neill] for the ball he gave to Ross [McQuillan]. I couldn’t understand why Jarly Og [Burns] wasn’t going on with the ball because I hadn’t heard the final whistle.
“I definitely wasn’t a beacon of calm. Those moments were anarchy in my head. Just willing it to be over...
“I could be all bravado sitting here telling you I was sure we were going to win. We hit the post, they hit the post. There was one point in it, and I definitely thought: is this going to be us again?”
Amid the beer-spraying madness and euphoria at becoming All-Ireland champions, Paddy Burns looked around the winning changing room.
He sank one bottle of Corona - out of sheer thirst more than anything else – and looked across at Rory Grugan who’d lost his dad in 2016 – “It was like a switch flicking in my mind towards my football career with Armagh and [wanting] to go on to be better at it,” Rory told The Irish News last year.
Burns looked at Aaron McKay – a warrior who emerged from the wreckage of the 2021 season and became an improved version of himself.
“I was happy for so many because a lot of people in that dressing room have gone through a lot of things that people don’t know about. There are ups and downs in life and that’s how it works,” Burns says.
“I just looked at Niall Grimley. His late brother Patrick gave me my first job, in Bar One Racing in Dundalk. I worked in the head office there for a couple of years. A lovely fella.
“I don’t gamble, I’d no knowledge of bookmaking at all but I had a head for numbers. I was delighted for Niall.”
Burns’s seat is roughly halfway up the team bus, facing the toilet.
As the Garda escort enabled the All-Ireland winning bus to breeze up on the outside lane of the M1 towards the Carrickdale Hotel, Burns decamped to the back.
Tiernan Kelly was to his left, in the corner, ‘Soupy’ Campbell to his right and Aidan Forker and Rory Grugan further along the back row.
There was a singsong at the front of the bus.
The inside lane was at a standstill with Armagh supporters hanging out car windows and sunroofs saluting their heroes.
As they approached the Carrickdale, Forker and Burns made their way to the front of the bus.
Lights, camera, action, The Sunday Game cut back and forth from the studio to the sprawling function room in the Carrickdale.
A pint of Guinness and two Jameson’s and ginger ale were the sum total of Burns’s alcohol in-take the entire night.
“I’ve never been the biggest drinker, so I was definitely in the want-to-remember-it camp.
“I enjoyed the banquet and I enjoyed sitting with our partners and chatting to Orla. Obviously, our days were very different.
“She travelled up with all the wives and girlfriends and she arrived back at the hotel separately to me. I nearly needed that sense of calm and chill for an hour.
“She was asking questions – what was this like, what was that like? I was asking about how her day went.”
As the night wore on, Burns laughs now at how he needed a “burst of” Rian O’Neill and Ciaran Mackin – the life and soul of the party – before getting to bed at around 5.30am and waking up for the first time as an All-Ireland champion.
For the next morning’s visit to Craigavon Hospital, it wasn’t a case of who wanted to go - who was fit to go.
Kieran McGeeney, Aidan Forker, Ben Crealey, Jarly Og, Tiernan Kelly and Burns made the trip.
Monday night, the Armagh players were well looked after in Basil Shiels’ place.
‘Geezer, you need to get us some cigars.’
Later, Geezer threw Burns a plastic bag full of cigars. The players had their own area upstairs in Shiels’.
“I think a few Armagh people managed to get in and at one stage a fan fell from the roof of the smoking area – he’d climbed over a roof to get in – and fell in among us. That was carnage.
“The fella was grand. He just scuttled to the end of the bar.”
Boom! The Athletic Grounds was a heaving mass of euphoric orange earlier on the Monday.
“That was probably a lot of people’s highlight,” he says.
“When you walked onto the stage the whole pitch was covered with supporters, and you were thinking: ‘We were here last Thursday night training and look at the place…’
“You were picking people out in the crowd and every time someone lifted the trophy, you’re thinking, they’re going to be bored of this now, but there was another cheer and another cheer.
“Even now I’m talking about it, I feel myself getting excited about it. It was amazing. You read about athletes and even musicians and they talk about big events being anti-climactic, not living up to what they expected - is-this-it kind of feeling.
“I genuinely felt that it was more than I ever expected it to be. It was just so fulfilling, so fulfilling.”
On Tuesday night, some boys were in Toal’s in Camlough, others were in Red Neds in Armagh.
A bus scooped up the ones in Camlough and ushered them to Maghery – Aidan Forker’s club – for some food and a presentation.
Wednesday, the boys descended on Ciaron O’Hanlon’s wedding. It was the soft landing many of the players needed, including Burns.
After O’Hanlon’s wedding day, Burns called a halt to the post-match drinks, while a squad of the Armagh boys headed off to celebrate Aaron McKay’s stag weekend in Berlin.
Burns smiles and winces at the prospect of the Berlin trip.
ON the Thursday before the All-Ireland final, Burns climbed into his car to make the journey from Burren – where he now plays his club football – to The Athletic Grounds.
Everything was running like clockwork. Burns’s parents arrived at their home to mind baby Clodagh while Orla was getting through her sports massage and reflexology appointments.
Just as Burns began driving, he bit down on a sweet and felt one of his back teeth becoming dislodged. There was no pain but a sense of panic set in.
‘Is this going to be sore tonight, tomorrow night? When is it going to hit? Am I going to struggle to sleep?’
A self-confessed over-thinker, he couldn’t phone Orla for some calm reassurance.
He scrolled through his phone and rang Burren club-mate and former Down defender Dan McCartan, a dentist by trade, based in Bessbrook.
‘Dan is there any chance you could see me over the next few days? I don’t like asking.’
‘What are you doing now?’ Dan asks.
‘I’m on my way to training?’
‘Come and see me now.’
‘I’ll ring Kieran.’
Burns rings Geezer in a flap. It’s far from ideal for a team just three days out from the biggest game of their lives.
He’ll be late for training due to this emerging dental problem.
Everything is relative - so this is the biggest problem of Patrick Burns’s life right now.
“So, I landed at Dan’s place – forgot to ring him back to say I was coming. I arrived in at five o’clock.
“The girl at reception says: ‘Who are you? Why are you here?’ I went upstairs and there was an Armagh fan in with Dan, just before me.
“So, I hid behind the door as I didn’t want to get chatting. It turned out Dan gave me a nice, white filling, didn’t charge me and wished me luck and sent me on my way!”
A Down man saved the day. Life is full of quirks.
BURNS didn’t know what it was – but it certainly wasn’t nerves he was feeling ahead of the All-Ireland quarter-final against Roscommon at Croke Park.
This was the hump Armagh simply couldn’t get over. Tyrone 2017. Galway 2022. Monaghan 2023. If the Armagh players were nervous, they’d every right to be.
For Burns, he felt almost a zen-like calm.
Roscommon were negotiated with a bit to spare.
Armagh hadn’t reached an All-Ireland semi-final since 2005.
Kerry. The Kingdom. Gaelic football’s bluebloods. History. Tradition.
David Clifford. Sean O’Shea. Paudie Clifford. The nerves would surely kick in then. But they didn’t.
“I remember walking around the parade smiling and thinking, this is exactly where I want to be. I had my diary, scribbling in it right before the game: ‘This is what you’ve always wanted to do – don’t forget to enjoy it.’
“And then for the final, I felt, ‘Right, I’m definitely going to feel the nerves here.’ But I just loved it like the other games.”
Why?
Why did Paddy Burns – one of life’s great over-thinkers – not become submerged in nerves before the biggest game of his life?
“There is definitely an element knowing I had the work done, especially with Julie [Davis] and Maura [McGeeney] there - we couldn’t be in better hands, but I also think it’s related to your personal life.
“Any problem you have, you go can go to Kieran with,” Burns says.
“He’s helped me as a person as much as improving me as a player. I spoke about being in the best place I’ve ever been, physically.
“But that came from the year before and being in the worst place I’ve ever been because my hamstring and calves kept going on me. That was all tension and stress.
“My wife and I were married in 2020, and we were trying for a baby. Two years of trying, nothing happening.
“When you’re young and it’s happening for all your friends straight away… I was out of the house with football more than I’d wanted. I tend to over-think and carry that tension and stress, and as a result I was getting injured a lot.
“I went to Kieran. It was just simple conversations with him. Of course, with hindsight, so many couples go through the same thing. There was nothing wrong – it just took time.
“People probably look at Kieran from the outside and think you couldn’t talk to him about anything other than football. But he has such a kind ear.
“He comforted me in ways by just saying: ‘You will absolutely have a child some day and you will be the best father.’
“Those conversations helped. Everybody has their own problems going on in life and every problem is relative.
“I’ve no doubt he handled my problem the same as another player’s – very personal, private and with care – and that’s why everybody wants to play for him because we know he cares about us.”
Baby Clodagh turned one on Wednesday.
“She’s full of mischief, she’s full of trouble. She’s class.”
IT’S eight days since the Armagh players climbed the steps of Hogan and their captain Aidan Forker delivered one of the best victory speeches in living memory.
It’s a rainy Monday afternoon and we’re sitting in a coffee shop on the outskirts of Belfast’s city centre, near Burns’s workplace, Prestige Underwriting. He is qualified in Actuary.
You couldn’t get a more hum-drum day to bring an All-Ireland winner back down to earth after an unforgettable week.
He is still wading through a few hundred emails – but his colleagues ensured his return to work, and reality, was gentle enough.
A banner, balloons, a bottle of champagne and a card of congratulations greeted him. The day before, he sat down and watched the All-Ireland final from start to finish.
Different faces have flashed through the mind’s eye since raising the Sam Maguire above his head.
Although he plays and is loving his football with Burren, he is a Forkhill man.
“That’s where I learned to play football. The people there taught me everything I know.”
Paddy McQuade, Sherman Hall, Martin Watters, his own father Fintan, Niall McGeough, Ciaran Mackin, Turlough Hannaway, Sean Judge, Misty Quinn.
“I met Paddy McQuade at the banquet. He was my U14 and U16 coach. There were tears running down his face. He was so proud. Me winning an All-Ireland is thanks to them as much as it is for me. Forkhill is where it all started.”
And he’s thankful to the good people of Burren who put up Armagh flags in solidarity with him.
Before we meet in the coffee shop, Kieran McGeeney texted into the group: ‘So what next?’
The kind of question that prompts a thousand different thoughts. Armagh’s world is one of infinite possibilities.
Paddy Burns joined the Armagh senior panel in 2016. Did he ever truly believe he would reach the top of the mountain?
“I visualised it,” he says.
“I nearly tried to force myself to believe it. In your heart of hearts, was I ever fully confident in doing it? I can’t say I was ever sure.
“I definitely thought we were capable of it but didn’t fully know if we could do it. I remember Aaron McKay saying a thing after we beat Dublin in Croke Park in Division One a couple of years ago, ‘We can absolutely do this.’
“I probably had that same feeling from then, that we could do it, but did I ever think we would? I hoped.”
Paddy Burns has pursued sporting excellence for long as time can remember and is now an All-Ireland winner.
He has Orla and Clodagh. Mum and Dad. He’s got those things. Underlined. Indelibly in his heart.
He’ll be ready to go again in 2025.
