CIARAN McKeever has witnessed Armagh’s rise from a side struggled to get out of Division Three to a team that will contest the 2024 All-Ireland showpiece. In his final season as an inter-county footballer (2017) Armagh missed out on promotion from the third tier.
McKeever took charge the Orchard County minors in 2019 and stayed with them for two seasons until Kieran McGeeney called his former teammate into his management team in 2021.
While the minors didn’t have success on the field of play, McKeever and McGeeney achieved the ultimate goal of bringing through a bunch of players that would be fit to compete at the highest level.
Oisin Conaty and Peter McGrane are the two most notable names that came through the ranks with the help of McKeever’s guidance. The pair have started every single game in the league and championship this season.
“It’s been insane,” said McKeever on the work that has gone on behind the scenes over the past number of years. “People from the outside probably don’t realise it, maybe some people from the inside don’t either.
“We just weren’t at the level. You can’t butter it up any other way, we weren’t at the level to compete in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. We started to get close to that level in 2019 and 2020.
“I remember retiring in 2017 and being sent down to manage the minors and I was sent down with a specific job to do, to try and get players in certain areas of the pitch that we were lacking.
“That’s the way that man (Kieran McGeeney) was thinking. He knew there was missing links still in the squad that he wanted to build, there’s no coincidence that Peter McGrain came from that, Oisin Conaty came from that.”
While the aforementioned McGrane and Conaty are the two that have made the initial breakthrough into the starting 15, there’s a number of others that have added to the Armagh squad throughout the season.
McKeever heaped praise on the Orchard Academy and the graft that has gone on to develop younger players in the county.
“You’ve Darragh McMullan there, you’ve Sean Conlon, Fergal O’Brien, Shea Magill,” continued the Cullyhanna clubman. “There’s about eight from that minor batch that’s come through and Oisin and Peter have started the whole championship campaign for us.
“D Mac (McMullan) is very close to coming in and adding to it now over the next two weeks. That’s just the way Geezer was thinking. He was trying to build a squad, he had it in his head what he wanted to build and what type of player he needed.
“That’s what our academy system has. Yes, we weren’t overly winning much at underage level and Aidan (O’Rourke) did a brilliant job this year in taking that minor team to an All-Ireland final, but the academy squad serves its purpose.
“We were trying to identify personnel that we needed to embed and try and build a senior squad and I think that’s evident in what Geezer has been looking this past five or six years.”