ON January 28th last year, Aidan Nugent, Jason Duffy and Ross McQuillan all played for Armagh in their Division One opener against Monaghan.
Fifty weeks later, the Cullyhanna trio whose county season ended on July 2, are delighted to still be on the road and preparing for their club’s first ever All-Ireland final against Cork and Munster champions Cill na Martra at Croke Park.
There hasn’t been a break, but Nugent isn’t complaining.
“Nowadays there’s no real off-season for county footballers,” he said.
“When the club season ends, lads start getting paranoid, they want to get ahead of the curve for pre-season with the county. You might take a week off and get a holiday in but most lads are back in the gym or doing runs by themselves anyway. At the minute, most lads train all year round.
“We’ve been lucky, we’ve been on the go but we’ve been playing football, we’ve had games every week and we’ve won Ulster and Armagh. It’s the middle of January and I’m playing for the club but it hasn’t felt like the year has dragged, I’ve really enjoyed it.”
Nugent has concentrated on his South Armagh club since July – the longest spell for many years. The free-taking forward admits that, because of ever-increasing county commitments he had lost touch with his roots to an extent.
“This is the first year, probably ever, that we’ve been together for about seven months,” he says. “In previous years you finished with the county and then you maybe got two or three league games and you’re knocked out in the first round of the championship and then back to Armagh – you mightn’t see the boys a whole pile.
“The craic has been good and I’m enjoying it, training with the boys two or three times-a-week. It’s been a breath of fresh air.”
An innovator as a player and in business, former teacher Nugent has run the Recover8 sports recovery facility in Armagh City since 2020. Six months ago he added the Blue Barista café next door and installed a gym upstairs.
He was in the Cullyhanna squad that reached the 2013 county final and played in the 2016 decider. He scored nine points out of 0-13 that day but Cullyhanna were beaten by Maghery and, after consecutive relegations from 1A to 2A in the league, this season’s success most have seemed a far-off dream to some at the start of the campaign.
“There have been ups and downs but you take all the downs for a week like this,” says Nugent.
“When you’re involved in the set-up, you don’t sit back and look at what’s going on, you just think about the next training session or ‘who are we playing next?’ and you try and find out about them and what are they good at.
“But when you think that the club’s going to be emptying out on Sunday and there’s going to be buses going to Croke Park to watch us, it’s bigger than you think.
“Sometimes you can get worked-up about these games if you haven’t been there. If we (the experienced players) can get talking to some of the younger lads and get them to realise that, yes it’s Croke Park and it’s a big day, but it’s really about nailing our gameplan and sticking to what we’re good at it regardless of where the game’s played, or what’s at stake.”