Dads and kids. As the cameras followed Jarly Óg Burns running up the steps of the Hogan Stand to embrace his GAA president father, Pádraic Joyce stood on the sideline with his son Charlie (8) and daughter Jodie (7). The noise was full-on by now so he bent down to comfort them. Or maybe for them to comfort him.
All around was delirium, the rumble and riot of an All-Ireland famine ended, the noise and whoosh of a county unchained. Armagh, All-Ireland champions for only the second time in their history. Orange fizzing everywhere, the Hill looking like a Fanta explosion in a bouncy castle.
It was low scoring and it was dogged, the 1-11 to 0-13 scoreline adding up to the fewest points in an All-Ireland final since 2015. The usual glib remark when a game is like that is to say that Armagh won’t care how it was achieved, only that it was. But the flipside is actually true – Armagh cared very much. They cared enough to construct a gameplan that would deliver exactly this type of game. And with it, Sam Maguire.
They’d had enough, basically. Enough of playing in tight games and coming out on the wrong side of them. One was against Galway, in the 2022 All-Ireland quarter-final. Kieran McGeeney would say they didn’t lose that game, they were beaten on penalties. Just as they were three more times in the interim. They didn’t lose here either. They don’t lose very often nowadays at all.
“Sometimes your strongest steel is forged in fire,” said McGeeney afterwards. “There is no doubt about that. It affects you in a way that is very hard to articulate to people, when your personality is entwined in a victory or defeat and the impact that can have on you and what it can do. In those moments that we lost on penalties and those moments where we sat in there with our heads in our hands, did that have an impact on the last five minutes? Definitely.
“When they refused to be beaten, even though we were trying our best to beat ourselves in that five or six minutes, there was fellas like Ben [Crealey], everybody, throwing their bodies on the line just to win and to refuse that [feeling of defeat] once more. Hopefully, as it did with us back in the day, it can change and you can have a bit of a bounce off that. I hope this county does. But they’ll have a week to celebrate first.”
[ Five key moments from Armagh’s dramatic All-Ireland win over GalwayOpens in new window ]
The story of the final is a story of misses. Armagh minimised theirs – only six wides all day and one dropped short. Galway took 25 shots and scored 13 points. Shane Walsh missed four kicks from placed balls. The early loss of Rob Finnerty robbed them both of a left-footed free-taker and an inside threat. Their midfield carried the scoring burden. No future in that.
“We’re absolutely devastated,” said Joyce when he came in. “The dressing room is in an awful state. Firstly, congratulations to Armagh and congratulations to Kieran McGeeney on the job he’s done with them. You can’t take that away from them. They won the game. We have to be realistic here. We didn’t play anywhere near to our potential in the second half. We probably made more mistakes in the second half than we’ve made in all the games all year.
“A couple of years ago, in the last couple of minutes of the game Kerry were a better team than us. Today, we had chance after chance after chance and it’s going to be hard to take. It’ll be a tough couple of days trying to get home tomorrow and we can hopefully hide in the middle of race week next week and do something out of the way but it’s going to be a tough few days.”
Armagh head off to a golden summer, one that has been a long time in the making. They are not a Kerry or a Dublin, a place that can run footballers off the production line in batches and at will. The likes of Rory Grugan and Stefan Forker were only kids when McGeeney arrived and must have presumed that a day like was for other people. He convinced them otherwise.
“They deserve a lot of credit for this,” McGeeney said. “That is going back to Division Three. I asked a lot of people to stay and help and not everybody did. But they were willing. They were very young too. They showed great maturity and understood what I was talking about. I told them it was going to take time and that it wasn’t going to be easy. [They] would take a lot of hard feedback. There was some hard feedback from myself at times. They were always willing to do it. It is fantastic.
“That is how counties like ours work. You get waves of players and you are trying to keep those older players. I am hoping this particular win will make those particular players stay on for another year … You are just hoping those players will stay together to pull that next wave through until that age group become the elder statesman.”
At just a shade after 6.30pm, the Armagh team bus pulled up outside their dressing room. Out came Daniel Quinn, officious and smart in a pristine white shirt, glowing as the driver of the coach that would bring the new champions home. He had been busy since the end of the game – the top of the coach was already emblazoned in bright orange lettering: All-Ireland Champions 2024.
When did you do that, Daniel? “Five minutes ago, under the Cusack Stand. I had it with me in the bus, just in case.”
He was ready. So were Armagh. Champions, after everything.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
