IT WOULD SEEM only right that we commence a week of All Ireland football final coverage by reaching for the Bible. Timothy 4:7, to be precise;
‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.’
Such thunderous sentiments could apply to any number of Armagh footballers, but especially to the old stagers.
Most notably, Rory Grugan. An All Ireland minor winner in 2009, he made his full senior debut in 2011 under Paddy O’Rourke. Since then he has had Paul Grimley and, from 2015 on, Kieran McGeeney as managers.
Grugan teaches languages and as an articulate voice in the squad, was frequently called upon to offer an explanation for Armagh’s dreadful form in the Ulster championship in the early years of McGeeney’s decade in charge.
Back in May 2019 with doubt hanging over McGeeney’s continued involvement, Grugan stated, “As a manager, he is a brilliant man to get the best out of you, not only as a footballer but as a person. He is the type to make you want to get the best out of yourself. He is the type of character who has high standards and will always try to push you to your best.
“In terms of why it hasn’t translated, I suppose we would like to take more responsibility as players ourselves. We feel would have a lot of good work done in terms of preparing for certain games but we just didn’t perform on the day and in particular the Ulster Championship.”
Two years previously, he was left with trying to explain away three Ulster championship campaigns without a single win.
“After the Down game, people were looking a lot into it, wondering what went wrong and why we were so flat,” he said.
“It just came back to not doing what we’d tried so hard all year — all that coaching.
“It was us as players who didn’t implement it.”
A year later, and Armagh travelled to Fermanagh for an Ulster quarter-final. They lost 0-12 to 0-7. It was year four of McGeeney’s five-year arrangement and they still had to record a single win in the Ulster championship.
Despite it all, neither Grugan or any other player shirked the responsibility or blamed it on McGeeney.
It’s remarkable, but he kept a united panel, with no fall outs and precious few leaks. And after a decade of trying, they are 70 odd minutes away from an All Ireland title.
“We grew up as a team watching Armagh win Ulster titles and you probably got a bit spoilt in the noughties that it was just the done thing,” Grugan said at the recent Armagh press conference at the Carrickdale Hotel.
“We really wanted to get to that level, get a run in Ulster, because we know how much the Ulster championship means to us as a province, so that was always disappointing.
“It’s easy to say now after the fact, but it did always feel like we were trying to do the right thing and I’m sure you can find interviews with me saying where it felt like the players had let ourselves down, as opposed to how we were coached or how we were approaching games, and that we flopped on certain days and had defeats that we wouldn’t have been expected to lose.
“That’s why I always trusted that, and the ability we had to bounce back, beat good teams, and go on good runs, it showed that we were doing the right thing.”
A year ago today, Rory Grugan with one of the all-time great Armagh goals [and second fastest ever in the football championship] 🏐pic.twitter.com/TOAW9uRT0i
— Ronan MuIIɐn (@RonanReigns) June 12, 2023
Sticking at it requires a level of self-reflection and ability to stare at the man in the mirror. Blaming management is often the easy way out.
“I was chatting to someone else there about what you try and create in a team and the whole culture word around high performance, it’s cliched, but we have created a group where we are all very close and we believe in what we are doing, and that is why people stick around,” he says.
“Given how we have lost games in the last two years, it would be very easy to walk away and say ‘enough is enough’ but the fact that boys have kept coming back later in their careers, we now have a group of boys who have been through all of that, who keep coming back to the well, so that’s a testament to Geezer and the management and all of the boys who have done that.”
To his credit, McGeeney never stopped challenging himself. Every few years he has added a new face to the backroom team, rather than accept the cosy consensus. This year, Conleith Gilligan is there and has formed close ties to the players in no time at all, forensically assessing substitute contributions and overall team image among other areas.
As for the panel, they have added quality and retained experience. The likes of Oisin Conaty has been tempted away from a career in the Irish League with Portadown. They have held on to the Stefan Campbells, the Aidan Forkers.
It means that their substitute bench is the most talked about in the game, with talent such as Oisín O’Neill, Stefan Campbell, Jarly Óg Burns and Ross McQuillan now coming on and exerting proper influence on games.
On the Saturday night of the All Ireland semi final win over Kerry, the team bus avoided the massive tailbacks at the M1 tollgate, instead making a charge up the hard shoulder to the encouragement of Armagh cars parping their horns, dizzy at the thought of a first All Ireland final in 21 years.
By the time Grugan got home it had gone midnight. The body was wrecked but his mind was on fire, so he sat and stared at his phone, for the fan videos of Croke Park, and let it all soak in.
On Sunday, he met with a few team mates for a recovery session, a bite to eat and then settled in to watch the Galway win over Donegal.
Galway again. Of course. The side they lost on penalties to in the 2022 quarter-final. The side they beat in Carrick on Shannon in 2023, and the side they nicked a late equaliser to draw with in Markievicz Park this summer.
This year, there’s an attitude to Armagh. They are bullishly going after what is theirs, and what’s not theirs. A noticeable trait is how their leading players are now engaging with the crowd, waving arms and feeding their energy. It’s a Kieran thing, but a Donaghy thing, not a McGeeney one.
“It definitely isn’t something that is planned, and I know in the high performance (space) you’re taught around being emotionless, being clinical, next ball – and there is a certain element to that within every game and every team, but sometimes you have to ride on that emotion,” says Grugan.
“Someone who would be big on that is Kieran Donaghy in terms of – Gaelic football now is about momentum, there’s a lot of slow attacks, a lot of plays where it is point for point, those moments where you can get momentum, maybe you have squeezed a kick-out, you get two or three points in a row, you can feel the crowd coming, and that is definitely happened us in some of these big games recently.
“That is your moment to drive it on, and whether that is a fist pump to the crowd to drive them on, the Armagh ones are usually going anyway, but it definitely adds to that feel, and I saw Jack O’Connor’s comments about the goal, and how the crowd lifted, and how they struggled to react to that.
“That probably tells you something about the fact that, as players you have to live off that buzz, that emotion, it might help you get a score or two, and it could be the score that makes the difference so there is definitely something in that.”
Of course, he was there at the All Ireland final in 2002.
“I followed that team through the noughties and you just looked up to your heroes, to Geezer, Oisin McConville, Steven McDonnell, all of these players, John McEntee,” he says.
“Everyone remembers what it was like that day, and I suppose that hunger for success among Armagh people is still there, I think you still see that with our mad supporters.”
He was on the upper tier that day with his cousin. He desperately wanted to be down on the pitch in the thick of the celebrations. But he was only a kid. His mother, sensibly, said no.
“I was gutted that I didn’t get on the pitch, but luckily I’ll be on the pitch this time.”
