AFTER three Championship games and around four hours of football, just one point has separated Armagh and Galway over the last three seasons.
The All-Ireland quarter-final in 2022 finished level after extra-time (Galway won on penalties), Armagh won by a point in a dramatic group stage meeting in Carrick-on-Shannon last year and last month (also in the group stage) the Orchardmen battled back to force another stalemate.
So there has been virtually nothing between the teams and Galway are well aware that Armagh will cling on and keep fighting no matter what is thrown at them in Sunday’s All-Ireland final.
The Tribesmen were five points up and in control three-quarters of the way through the most recent meeting in Sligo when Rob Finnerty burst through the Armagh defence. Had his fisted effort gone over the bar then Galway might well have gone on to win but the ball landed on the top of the crossbar and bounced back out instead of over it.
From there Armagh broke and scored a point and the ensuing Galway kickout went straight to Conor Turbitt who played in Tiernan Kelly. The ball finished in the Galway net and a couple of minutes later it was level.
It’s all about fine margins when these counties meet…
“Every time we’ve played Armagh this last few years there’s only been a kick of the ball in the game,” says Finnerty, wincing slightly as he recalls his missed chance.
“It was a draw that time (in Sligo) and that was obviously a missed opportunity at the time. I looked back on that… Yeah, it was a tight game, there wasn’t much to separate us.”
As well as the Championship meetings there was a League game at the Athletic Grounds last year which Galway won by two points so the teams know each other exceptionally well. The 2022 clash was marred by fighting as the teams went down the tunnel at Croke Park but Finnerty says there is no “aggro” between players.
“I wouldn’t say it would be aggro necessarily,” he says.
“But when you’ve played a team so many times you do start to learn things about them and they’d be the same with us so definitely we’ll look back at that game in Sligo and there were some positives and some negatives and we’ll try and work on some things from that.”
The draw with Armagh in Sligo meant Galway had to take the more arduous route via the preliminary quarter-final stage but they beat Monaghan comfortably enough and then, in their third game in just 14 days, dethroned Dublin and went on to beat Donegal to reach a second All-Ireland final in three seasons.
“It was great to beat Dublin and this might sound a small bit cliched, but we treat every game the same way and from the start of the year we always have,” said Finnerty.
“So it doesn’t matter who we’re coming up against, we feel like if we can perform to the best of our ability that we’re a match for anyone.”
