Skilfully-woven tale of an iconic football team

Cavanman's Diary

Every now and then, something catches your attention, maybe just for a flickering moment, and transports you somewhere else entirely. I had the good fortune to experience this recently when reading a magnificent new book, which charts the rise and fall of one of Gaelic football’s most iconic teams, who came along at a remarkable moment in time for the sport.

The 2002 Armagh crop were extraordinary; my over-riding emotion after finishing the 238-page Kings For A Day, which rattles along at a great pace, was that we won’t see their like again. The sport has just changed too much.

Perhaps the great game mirrors society in general; the super-rich have gotten super richer. While most of us are better off materially than our parents were growing up, the housing crisis notwithstanding, some elements of a bygone, more innocent time are lost forever.

So it goes in football. County teams have never been as well funded, players are better prepared than ever, but the gap between the haves and have-nots – or should that be, haves and never-will-have-agains, is insurmountable.

A thousand pikes might still flash from time to time but risings are now squashed much more easily. Often, they are first weakened from within – players lack the perseverance, officials lack the vision – and then flattened entirely from without.

There was a time, though… and what a time it was. If the early ’90s belonged to Ulster, the early noughties were every man’s. Kildare, Westmeath and Laois were winning Leinster titles, Fermanagh were in an All-Ireland semi-final, Sam was crossing the Shannon. And, in the middle of it all, Armagh and Tyrone were winning their first All-Irelands at senior level.

It was an era when, truly, any Gaelic footballer could aspire to being king for a day – and it is fitting, as stated, that this is the title chosen for this new book by O’Brien Press, sub-titled ‘The Story of Armagh and their 2002 Journey to Sam Maguire’ and penned by Gaelic Life and RTÉ journalist Niall McCoy.

McCoy, a native of Dromintee, has been in thrall to Armagh all his life. He watched the rise of their great team of the late ’90s and noughties as a young fan on the terraces, under that potent spell; the panache of McConville, McDonnell and Marsden, the steel of McGeeney and Co at the back. Benny Tierney in his Camposesque jerseys, one part goalie and one part stand-up comic. Big Joe, brash and effervescent and messianic in his own way.

The story is told chronologically, apart from a delightful, short but meandering prologue. New readers will be struck by McCoy’s skill as a wordsmith immediately from the opening paragraph when he brings us back to a training camp at “Tommy Mackle’s Hotel in Maghery” in 1953; a delicious phrase, redolent of times past, as intended, and an evocative image, which sets the tone.

And what is that tone? It’s one of journey, not just for this team but Armagh football in general. As the prologue illustrates, the county has a hell of a lot of history behind it, much of it sorrowful. In the early 1990s, they looked enviously across the county boundary at Down winning All-Irelands and by the middle years of the decade, they had earned an unwanted reputation as talented but flaky.

The characters emerge quickly. The ‘Two Brians’ (joint-managers Canavan and McAlinden, who led Armagh to a breakthrough Ulster title in 1999) helped turn the tide. They were from the old school but that was the approach needed at first to break down barriers.

There is a hilarious anecdote from McAlinden about instructing a doctor to give Jarlath Burns (whose own contributions are articulate and enlightening as is to be expected) an empty injection in his ankle. Half an hour later, he asked his midfielder how he was feeling. “Brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” came the reply.

The tussles with Kerry in 1999 and 2000 bring back memories of some classic encounters and just how close Armagh were prior to their breakthrough (some even argue that the 2000 team was their best ever).

The decision, then, to move on from the ‘Brians’ is dealt with delicately but authoritatively. In comes Kernan – who, it is confirmed, was considered by some in Cavan to be a shoo-in to take the vacant manager’s job here – and, as McCoy puts it succinctly, “Things would never be the same again.”

The All-Ireland success in 2002 is the centrepiece and we won’t spoil it – in fact, many of the squad, McCoy reveals, have never watched the game back themselves. The snippets he unearths around the game – how the famous letter from Muhammad Ali came about, for example – are fascinating.

If one line was to sum up the defiance of Armagh, that day and that era, it could be Justin McNulty’s honest account of his reaction when he heard stinging, and harsh, criticism from Pat Spillane: “I’ll show that bastard. I’ll show that f**king bastard.”

And they did, in glorious orange-tinted technicolour.

As happens, the empire eventually crumbled. The concluding pages deal with the fall – the loss to Tyrone in the 2005 All-Ireland semi-final which feels, in hindsight, definitive and which the author rightly described as “the pinnacle of one of the most captivating rivalries Gaelic football has seen”.

It was all of that – and bitter, too, among players and fans, and there is no shying away from that aspect either.

McGeeney, unthinkably, was taken off that day and Kernan addresses it (“Do I regret it? Of course I do. I respected Geezer so much but we were only thinking of one thing and that was winning the game.”)

Surprisingly, given they shared such a journey together, that Armagh team are not particularly close any more, something Steven McDonnell bemoans but dismisses as “part and parcel of retiring and moving away from the game”.

It’s a slightly sad note but an entirely honest one and in some way fitting for a team who never shied away from the truth.

McCoy hasn’t either. The author has done historians and Gaelic football followers in general a great service. Twenty years on seems like the optimum time to write a book like this –the protagonists are still around and their memories are still fresh yet enough distance has passed between then and now to provide perspective.

Kings For A Day is a most welcome addition to the Gaelic games canon and should be read by every person with an interest in high performance sport, in building something from nothing and, especially, in Gaelic football in Ulster and beyond.

As for that team and what they did - it seems unlikely it will be replicated now. And that makes this story all the more striking.