ASKED ABOUT THE NATURE of their loss in the tunnel of St Tiernach’s Park, Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney was already sick of the questions, but at the same time, laid himself bare.
For the second year in a row, they were beaten in the provincial decider on penalties.
“Everybody did well,” he said. “(It’s) a lottery at that stage.”
Twelve months ago after losing the 2023 Ulster final on penalties to Derry, he was similarly crestfallen.
“What do you do? It’s one of those things that it’s very difficult to prepare for. We take penalties after training; you try to do everything right but it’s in the lap of the Gods.”
The gap between victory and defeat is narrow but the chasm is deep. On the other side on Sunday was Donegal’s Peadar Mogan who described the final act.
“We were very lucky. There was just wasteful chances in extra-time, we were grateful we got it to penalties and it was luck then.”
Most people are satisfied with that. There is significant opposition towards using penalties to determine winners and losers in Gaelic Games, and one of the stock phrases in such conversations is how it is ‘a lottery’.
That theory betrays a lack of understanding.
In the Winter 2013 edition of The Sport and Exercise Scientist, Professor Geir Jordet, a Director of Psychology at the Norwegian Centre of Football Excellence, wrote: “Players’ perceptions of control are influenced by both beliefs about the role of skill or luck (contingency), and their beliefs about their penalty taking ability (competence).
“Players with low perceived competence and contingency (who believe the outcome is dependent on luck or the goalkeeper’s actions rather than skill) experienced more cognitive anxiety symptoms than those who perceived their competence and contingency level as high.”
How can that manifest itself?
Jordet and his colleagues examined hundreds of penalty kicks held during major tournaments. Their findings were fascinating.
“For example, players who take less than one second to place the ball on the penalty spot score on about 58% of their penalties whereas those who take longer score on about 80% of their penalties.
“Similarly, taking about a second or more to respond to the referee’s whistle to initiate the shot is associated with a higher probability of scoring than immediately rushing towards the ball.
“Therefore, players need to take their time they prepare for the shot, rather than rushing to get the penalty over and done with. Developing and practising a suitable pre-shot routine is a potentially useful way to guide these timings and help protect performance under pressure.
“Indeed, recent research by Wood and Wilson (2012) has suggested that learning a routine involving a gaze control element (look at the point where you want to shoot prior to the run-up) helped penalty takers in a shootout task to be more accurate, maintain effective visuomotor control and increase perceptions of psychological control and contingency.”
McGeeney added, “It’s hard luck but I suppose when it happens four times maybe it’s not hard luck, maybe it’s something else that we’re missing.”
Which immediately flags up the query around what psychological support is within the Armagh squad.
Although he is frequently described as a sports psychologist by some media outlets, Hugh Campbell is not qualified in the field. Armagh GAA have advertised him as a ‘Performance Coach’.
Whatever role he sees himself in, he has a long association with Armagh, going back to when Joe Kernan recruited him for his backroom team in 2002.
In that season, Campbell’s contributions to the team often invoked the Norman Mailer book, The Fight, and the 1974 boxing bout between George Foreman and the unfancied Muhammad Ali.
He would pepper team talks with Ali quotes, building a picture of an underdog that carried itself with supreme confidence.
His next-door neighbour was a TV producer and gave him the detail’s of Ali’s company. Campbell reached out. On the morning of the 2002 All-Ireland final, each player found a letter from Ali pushed underneath their bedroom door.
A number of players spoke about how this act inspired them to deliver the performance of a lifetime to win Armagh’s only All-Ireland.
Campbell was brought on board with McGeeney for Kildare, and later Armagh.
It’s known that McGeeney is hungry for information and a voracious reader that burns through books for nuggets and scraps of information that might help in the pursuit of success.
So much of his management career has mirrored that of his playing career. When he was a student, he would openly say on nights out in Belfast’s Botanic Inn that his ambition was to win an All-Ireland with Armagh. The reaction was often one of unbridled laughter. But ten years after making his debut, he was an Ulster champion.
In his tenth year as Armagh manager, he has lost the last two Ulster finals on penalty shootouts. After two years of getting kind draws, avoiding Derry, Tyrone, Monaghan and Donegal, the suspicion is that both parties, McGeeney and Armagh, could do with a change.
Belief and freedom of expression is something McGeeney has wrestled with his whole sporting life.
In 2016, he said, “Somebody once described the perfect player as someone who can train like it means everything but play like it means nothing.”
As aware as McGeeney is of that, Armagh produced something the exact opposite of it when the game was there to be won.
In the 53rd minute, they benefitted from a judgement call. Oisín Conaty slipped in possession, enough to spill the ball and allow Donegal’s Oisín Gallen get his toe to it.
He bent down to pick and received significant contact. A lot of referees would have given Gallen the free but Martin McNally waved play on. From the possession, Stefan Campbell scored to put Armagh four points up.
That was the last time they scored. They managed plenty of efforts towards goal in the last twenty minutes: Tiernan Kelly’s mark, and Rory Grugan and Rian O’Neill’s efforts that ballooned in the air and dropped short.
Where it tipped into the downright baffling was with the two marks for Jarly Óg Burns and Stefan Campbell that they recycled, rather than having a shot at goal, as difficult as that might have been.
“You could see in them,” said Lee Keegan on The Sunday Game, “They tightened up a little bit… Probably a little bit afraid to win it, to be honest. And that momentum is lost and for me these are the kind of examples; Rian O’Neill leaning back and taking a bit of a pot-shot short.
“I think Armagh will leave today gut-wrenched, to be honest. I really think that’s going to sting them a lot more than last year to be honest.”
Ultimately, it comes down to culture. Everything is culture.
On Saturday night, former Dublin manager Jim Gavin made a rare public appearance at west Belfast’s Féile na gCloigíní at an event to discuss community and leadership.
The host asked Gavin what or how he defined culture. Gavin replied that when he arrived at the venue, he noticed a load of rubbish lying around the front, and that it taught him plenty about the culture of the place.
You suspect that Dublin players will not die wondering what Gavin thought of them.
The culture of Armagh is a curious one. They have been involved in many examples of bust-ups and some plainly stupid on-pitch rows.
A quick look around the photography of the Ulster final has Armagh players in a state of over-arousal. Taunting opposition players, fist-pumping and milking the applause of the crowd.
It’s the exact opposite of the Dublin approach under Gavin, which was to ignore the scoreboard entirely.
Conducting some pre-season training in John Kavanagh’s gym, with his close associations with Conor McGregor, sends out signals around machismo and aggression.
It also creates another layer of pressure, where no player wants to be the one to miss a critical shot.
What does ‘seeing a game out’ mean, only executing the plays? And Armagh failed to execute.
A fear of failure is either neutralised or amplified by leadership.
The Swiss-born business theorist and psychologist Edgar Schein once explained it in these terms: “Organizational cultures are created by the leader, and one of the decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management, and – if and when that may become necessary – the destruction of culture.”
Another idea in organisational culture holds that “Either you change the people, or… you change the people.”
