Dr McKenna Cup Section A: Armagh v Tyrone (tonight, 7.30pm, Athletic Grounds)
NO fixture in Gaelic football displays the lust left by winter better than this one.
Armagh and Tyrone have had high-summer meetings of great consequence. All-Ireland finals, semi-finals, Ulster finals, big knockout qualifiers, the lot.
But in many ways, it’s a rivalry best described through the prism of frosty January days and nights.
Chinese whispers rarely undersell an item but that’s what has become of their 2006 McKenna Cup meeting.
Memories as foggy as a Newry Sunday refer blindly to The Day 10,000 Showed Up For A McKenna Cup Match.
That sunny January afternoon 18 years ago no fewer than 19,631 spectators actually poured into Casement Park.
Just 147 days had passed since they’d shared the hallowed Dublin turf and produced an All-Ireland semi-final that stands up yet against any in history.
Mick McGrath flashed 11 yellow cards. Stephen O’Neill and Sean Cavanagh shared nine points for Tyrone, Stevie from Killeavy notched six for Armagh, who lost by two.
In one of his books, Harte: Presence Is The Only Thing, former Tyrone boss Mickey recalled its importance: “We had maybe half our All-Ireland team, they had nine or ten of the team from the All-Ireland semi-final. Didn’t matter to the public, though. The jerseys were enough. It turned into a battle. The hits didn’t seem that hard but the referee flashed five yellow cards in the first 20 minutes. People certainly weren’t standing around admiring each other. It was flat-out stuff for January and to win was an important blow to strike…Laying down markers isn’t an all-consuming thing but beating Armagh was vital at that point. This was a statement of intent.”
Those were peak days for football, not just in Ulster. If word got out of an envelope arriving for Joe Kernan, half the country would have raced over to watch him open it.
Games between Armagh and Tyrone are like a solo justification for the very existence of the McKenna Cup, with which the calendar continues to grapple.
Their fortunes have both dropped from the height of the noughties, Armagh’s more dramatically before their recent upturn, but there were still 11,318 in the Athletic Grounds when they met again in the final four years ago.
Armagh got the upper hand when Tyrone were at their lowest ebb in the 2022 qualifier meeting but mostly, the Red Hands have maintained their stranglehold on the fixture. They got their own back twice last year, relegating their Blackwater neighbours on the last day of the league and then beating them in the All-Ireland group stage.
The named teams for tomorrow night reflect that both sides are less bothered by the one-upmanship and more by the desire to unearth a few rough diamonds they can polish at through the year.
Kieran McGeeney handed over control of their opening game to U20 manager Barry O’Hagan, but there’s a better mix of seniority through a team in which the standout presence is that of Oisin O’Neill.
He hasn’t played for Armagh since the championship opener against Donegal in 2022, tormented by a series of injuries that he finally got the better of to help Crossmaglen to another county title in the autumn.
Jarly Óg Burns’ exile was short lived. He’s on a bench that also contains Niall Grimley, Jemar Hall and Ciaron O’Hanlon.
Michael McKernan gets a try-out at full-back for Tyrone. It feels inevitable that Padraig Hampsey will move into Ronan McNamee’s number three shirt as the year goes on and McKernan will revert to the corner, but that leaves them needing a four.
Peter Harte’s presence in the forward line sticks out like a sore thumb. He’s surrounded by the rawness of youth on all sides, with Ciaran Daly and James Garrity earning spots off Trillick’s great season.
Lorcan McGarrity (Carrickmore), Tiarnan Quinn (Coalisland) and Ryan Jones (Dungannon) will also look to impress.
A Tyrone win simplifies matters in that Donegal will progress top of the group on head-to-head. If Armagh win, there’s the potential for yet more complication over the eligibility row that threatens Jim McGuinness with an eight-week sit in the stands.
Donegal’s win over Armagh is voided which means score difference or head-to-head can no longer apply. Whether anyone has the appetite or the time to squeeze in another game, potentially knocking the whole tournament out of sync and leaving the final to eat up the National League’s break week, we’ll have to see.
But appetite is rarely lacking in this fixture.