ONCE they were the hunted and opponents the length of the land trained their sights on the black and amber jersey.
Rivals studied them jealously and plotted ways, by fair means and foul, to take them down but at Armagh, Ulster and All-Ireland level Crossmaglen Rangers beat them all and won it all.
Those days, when winning county championships were almost a formality, had to end sometime and as championship season gets into full swing in the Orchard county it’s Clann Eireann who hold the Gerry Fegan Cup now. The year before that, Maghery took the cup back to their Loughshore home.
Tomorrow Stephen Kernan’s Crossmaglen side begin their championship season against near-neighbours Silverbridge Harps and you have to go back (but not that far back) to 2019 for Rangers’ last title.
Still, any club that wants to call themselves kings of the Orchard county still has to beat Cross to do so. Yes, they have lost the last two county deciders, but they’ll do their damnedest to stop that losing run stretching further.
Callum Cumiskey, fully fit again after a battering with injuries, says Cross will treat every game this year like a final up to and including, they hope, the actual final and the versatile 28-year-old is chomping at the bit to get started.
Go back to October 24th, 2020 and everything was going brilliantly for Cumiskey. Just a couple of days after he and his partner Amy had welcomed their son Kayden into the world, he started up front for Armagh in their final Division Two match against Clare in Ennis.
The stakes were high that day. Armagh needed a win to seal promotion and less than two minutes into the game Cumiskey – a new face on the Orchard county panel that season - took Rory Grugan’s brilliant pass, side-stepped the Banner ’keeper and walloped the ball confidently into the net to give his county the perfect start.
Armagh won the game and reached Division One but Cumiskey hasn’t featured in the top flight for his county.
What he describes as “fairly-weak ankles” are a family trait unfortunately and by the second half of that game in Clare he was struggling and had to come off. He did make his Championship debut for Armagh in the Ulster quarter-final victory against Derry but the ankle continued to cause him problems.
“Me and my brothers have had our fair share of ankle injuries in the past so, whenever it happened, I just thought it was jarred,” he says.
“I played 10 minutes against Derry and it was only later on, when the season was over and I got myself an MRI, that I realised it was more serious.”
He was told that surgery was required to repair ligament damage and he wasn’t long out of plaster when he had to return to hospital for an operation on his thumb (more ligament issues) which meant he missed practically the whole of last year.
“Things were going nicely,” he says, looking back at that 2020 season.
“I was getting plenty of game-time with Armagh and I was really enjoying my time with them. But you can’t really plan for injuries, they come along, they happen when they happen, and you just have to deal with it. You can’t let them set you back too much.
“If you require surgery, you get it done and get back on the road to recovery and try and become a better player and hope that things work out.”
He knows now how success can be fleeting and he learned lessons from sitting up in the stands. Football life passed him by as club and county games went on without him and he admits he found it difficult to watch. But every frustrating minute spent on the sideline fuelled his appetite to get back on the pitch.
“When you’re sitting on the sidelines and you’re not fit to play it re-ignites a bit of hunger in you,” he says.
“You’re sitting there, watching on, wishing you were out there being able to give it your all with the club and with the county. There were big games on and I wasn’t able to tog out so it definitely hit home how much it really means to me.”
He had the surgery, got through his rehab work and, after some substitute appearances, he forced his way back into the Crossmaglen starting line-up for last year’s county final against Clann Eireann.
Cumiskey scored the first two points of a cagey opening quarter but a grandstand finish from the Lurgan underdogs meant they took home the Gerry Fegan Cup, named after their former captain. Maghery had beaten them in the 2020 decider so it was Crossmaglen’s second final loss on-the-trot, a sequence unheard of since the 1940s.
But that’s all history now and Cross return to the fray this year more determined than ever to get back on top. With a full season of games in Division 1A behind him, Cumiskey is firing on all cylinders once again.
“I needed a full league campaign under my belt after the injuries just to make sure that the body was fit and capable of performing at this level again,” he said.
“So I’m comfortable now, I know everything is sorted out and I’m definitely looking forward to getting back into the heat of championship battle.”
Oisin O’Neill won’t feature on Sunday. The Armagh midfielder’s injury woes have continued and he has an Achilles tendon issue to deal with now but his brother Rian has emerged as the cutting edge for club and county and Jamie Clarke has returned to the fold after several years way from the action.
Cross finished third in Division 1A behind champions Armagh Harps and second-placed Killeavy. There were seven wins but six losses too and Cumiskey admits consistency has been a problem for a talented side.
“We definitely have the potential to perform,” he said.
“We have some serious players in the team but I suppose, we’ve learned from days like last year against Clann Eireann that we have to minimise the mistakes we’re making and really make hay whenever we are getting the purple patches.
“Whether that’s getting a few goals when the opportunity arises and then we need to have the composure in the final stages of the game.”
THE history of Crossmaglen Rangers has been discussed and documented meticulously by this stage. County champions every year but one from 1996 to 2015, 11 Ulster titles and six All-Ireland crowns during a golden era… Not to mention the club’s contribution to Armagh’s Sam Maguire-winning year in 2002.
That is an impossibly hard act to follow and the pressure of constantly being compared to the men of yesteryear must have weighed heavily on the shoulders of the young players who’ve taken up the cudgels since they took their final bow.
After a period of transition, a line has been drawn in the turf now. There is a sense that a fresh start has been made at the famous club and casting off the millstone of past glories is the only way the team of 2022 can really produce their best in the black and amber.
“You get nothing when you’re standing still,” says Cumiskey.
“We’re very aware that the prestige our club holds and the records previous teams have built but every year there is a new team and a new group of players who are representing Cross Rangers and it’s 100 per cent up to those men to create their own history.
“We can’t dwell on the experiences of previous teams, we have to go out and create our own experiences.
“There’s no point looking back at things that have been achieved, you have to live in the present and look at what’s in front of you at all times.”
CUMISKEY is well placed to know that. He broke into the senior panel in the 2012 season and saw action in that county final and throughout the successful Ulster campaign that followed it.
Early in 2013, Roscommon’s St Brigid’s ended the Cross charge for an All-Ireland three in-a-row and along with Aaron Kernan, James Morgan and Paul Hughes, he’s one of the few survivors from that day in Mullingar.
“There were some serious names in that team,” says Cumiskey, who won a second Ulster medal in 2015.
“I’m around the block 10 years’ now,” he says.
“It’s mad the way the time goes by. You don’t realise it when you start but it’s all about making the most of it when you do get the chance to wear a Cross jersey. I want to get the most out of myself that I can now because this is my ninth year with the senior team and there is a sense of leadership there now that I feel I have amongst the younger players.
“It’s a great privilege to be viewed as one of the elder players on the team and one of the players the younger boys look up to. It’s nice to be one of the lads who has a bit of experience under the belt and if any of the young lads want a bit of guidance it’s nice to be able to help them because it’s not that long ago that I was one of the younger fellas.
“We have a good team-spirit within in the team and it’s good to see. I remember when I started Tony Kernan was an inspiration to me. He was on the county team at the time and I remember him saying: ‘Don’t hold back, don’t take a backseat, you’re here to make a difference, you’re good enough to be called-up, so give it your all’. That’s the sort of memo I give to the young boys now.
“When I was looking in from the stands, it was the likes of my uncle John Donaldson and the likes of the McEntee twins that we were watching and we were hoping that someday we could fill the footsteps that they left behind them. That’s what it’s all about.”
THERE have been four winners of the Armagh Championship in the last six seasons and that obviously tells a tale. Cross, Maghery, Clann Eireann and Armagh Harps have all been top dogs and the competition between well led and well prepared teams sprinkled with county stars is fierce.
“It absolutely is more competitive now than it was for years,” says Cumiskey.
“And it’s no coincidence that Armagh have been doing better in the last couple of years – it’s because there is a more competitive club scene. From our own perspective, we’re not looking too far forward, we’re looking at the next game at all times.
“We can’t be complacent because that has caught us out in the past so our big day out is on Sunday against Silverbridge and that’s all we’re looking forward to.
“We’re trying to reach our third consecutive county final, there’s been no county championship in the club for the last two years and there is a real big push on this year. Every game will be approached like the county final until we eventually get there and do the business.”
Once they were the hunted, now Cross are the hunters.
The big-game season starts tomorrow…
