Enough learning. It’s time for Armagh to win

Ulster SFC final: Armagh v Donegal (Sunday, 4pm, Clones, live on BBC2 NI & RTÉ2)

IT’S fifteen years since Kieran McGeeney first walked through the doors of John Kavanagh’s gym with the Kildare footballers in tow.

Out of curiosity, he took them to do some Brazilian jiu-jitsu as part of their pre-season training.

Kavanagh is often credited with placing the phrase “win or learn” into the mainstream of Irish coaching.

McGeeney has built up enough experiences, particularly in the last few years, to be ready to win.

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The most pertinent in terms of Sunday’s Ulster final is the game with Donegal in Ballybofey two years ago.

Remember how the two teams fell out at the end of their league game in Letterkenny a few weeks previous, leaving a raft of suspensions and appeals that fed into their championship encounter?

A game that was crying out for Armagh to square up to, they took the strategical decision to concede the Donegal kickout rather than let Shaun Patton hurt them.

Donegal won eight of Ethan Rafferty’s first half kickouts and all of their own. The miracle was that there were only three points in it at the break.

Then Armagh came out and had a cut. Had a goal disallowed from the throw-in. They hounded Donegal in what was a totally different second half. But the damage was already done.

They’d stepped on to the field of battle asking for a truce. Donegal charged.

That day alone has fed the perception that Armagh are too negative.

It is a largely unfair perception but it has become embedded in their own support base.

They received local criticism after last year’s final for not pushing on and beating Derry from a great position but the reality was that, for all the talk of Donegal’s high press earlier this year, it was Armagh’s in that final last May that almost undid Derry.

They were organised and physical and they forced Odhran Lynch to have the ball and carry it, laid traps, used the sideline as an extra defender, all the hallmarks of a really effective press.

But they lost it from a position of great strength in extra-time, conceding those last couple of unnecessary frees that allowed Shane McGuigan to salvage penalties.

“When we learn to associate [losing] with improvement, something wonderful can happen in the head. We actually start chasing failure, if you want to say. We know we’re gonna fail our way up towards success.” That’s John Kavanagh again, with whom McGeeney has been good friends ever since.

If you want to call the last nine years failing upwards, that’s on you. But Armagh have improved incrementally across all of that time. Slowly, as though their watch was moving in half-seconds, but when you look at the base off which they’re working, it’s had to be that way.

No Ulster U20 title since 2007, no Ulster minor since ‘09, just two clubs in an Ulster minor final in the last 20 years, Crossmaglen’s last senior Ulster Club title in 2011 – Armagh are not working with anywhere near the depth of talent base those around them have had.

So yeah, it’s taken time and patience, and in recent years the latter has grown thinner.

All of which – all of it – plays into their hands for this one day.

They know from their own very sobering experience that conceding the kickout to Shaun Patton is not the way for them to go.

Above all, the Armagh people won’t accept another defeat like that. That leaves McGeeney really with no choice.

And the kickouts alone skew the whole perception of everything else. If Armagh go after the kickouts and lose, they’ll say ‘sure at least they had a cut’.

None of which really matters at the thin edge of trying to win Ulster titles against serious teams.

But for Armagh, going after the kickouts is the right thing to do regardless of the noise.

Here’s the bit. Donegal have played four serious games this year. Two of them were with Armagh in the league, the others their championship wins over Derry and Tyrone.

A lot of elements of their play have come together nicely. But their kryptonite so far has been the opposition kickout.

In the Athletic Grounds, they pushed up on Blaine Hughes man-to-man. The game was 50 minutes old and he was on his 15th kickout before Donegal got their hands on one.

Hughes was brilliant that day. He has been excellent all year. A whole different type of excellent to the fit-again Ethan Rafferty but any notion that Hughes might be swapped out is doing him a huge disservice.

This was Jim McGuinness speaking that day in the tunnel: “Armagh got their kickouts away very well and we struggled to get pressure on their kickouts in the first half. That had a big impact on the game from our point of view.”

Donegal did slightly better in Croke Park, but against Derry it was poor and Niall Morgan unpicked them with such ease for 50 minutes (Tyrone won all of his first 11 restarts before his own error cost him on the 12th) that it has begun to feel like a problem.

They eventually solved it to some degree in the final quarter, winning three of Tyrone’s last five restarts in normal time by finally abandoning their zonal setup and going man-to-man.

Against Derry they won just three out of 21.

In the league final with Armagh it was four out of 23.

Maybe they aren’t prioritising it but they’re still committing nine men to the press every time. It just isn’t working. Donegal have scored just 0-4 off the opposition kickout in those four games combined, and conceded 1-30.

All of which is normal enough except for this being their first Ulster final without Michael Murphy. Hugh McFadden’s sciatic issue rules him out.

Jason McGee is playing superb stuff and Michael Langan is growing into a permanent midfield role but outside that, Armagh’s middle eight is a far more physically imposing unit.

They have the kickers from outside – Forker, O’Neill, Mackin, Campbell, Turbitt – to try and draw Donegal out a bit.

If Armagh are really prepared to go after the game and impose themselves on it, it is sitting there to be won.

Their people are desperate to see them either come back with their shield or on it.

Enough learning.

It’s time for Armagh to win.