How Armagh fell from being the most feared team in Ulster to 16 years without a provincial title

When the whistle went, the Armagh crowd invaded the pitch in Clones like it was the first time any of them had set foot on the turf. The 2008 Ulster final had gone to a replay and though Fermanagh hadn’t wilted second time around as everyone expected, Armagh handled them like a line cook knocking out burgers on a Saturday night. They didn’t have to go looking for the ingredients. Everything was where it always was.

Between 1999 and 2008, Armagh played 32 games in the Ulster championship and lost only three. Beating Fermanagh in ‘08 made it seven Ulster titles in 10 seasons. In the history of the province, that sort of run had only ever been racked up by two sets of players – the Cavan sides that had stockpiled titles in the early 20th century and the eternal Down team of the 1960s. The gods, basically.

When the pitch had cleared and the crowds had departed, manager Peter McDonnell took out a cigar he had been saving for the occasion and lit it in triumph. It was his first season in charge and as the man who had taken over from Joe Kernan, he was under no illusions that this was a box that had to be ticked. Armagh football was in the best shape it had ever been and Ulster titles were a skintight fit.

That was 16 years ago. The idea that Armagh would still be waiting on their next Ulster title in 2024 would have been an impossible concept to convey to anyone in Clones that day. Even allowing for the province’s usual bobbing and weaving, if you were picking any of the nine counties to go the next 16 years without connecting, Armagh would have been dead last on everyone’s list.

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“It wasn’t just that we were winning Ulsters, it was all the stuff that was going on underneath it,” says Aaron Kernan, wing back and dead-eyed freetaker that day. “At senior level, we had won an All-Ireland, we had won loads of Ulster titles, we had won a National League.

“So then you’d be thinking, ‘Right, well what else can we be doing as a county? Let’s get the underage in order.’ We won our first ever under-21 title in 1998. We won an Ulster and All-Ireland under-21 in 2004. We won an Ulster minor in ‘05, another Ulster under-21 in ‘07 and then an Ulster and All-Ireland minor in ‘09.

“You actually had everything you needed. A nucleus of players who had won four, five, six Anglo Celts, who’ve won Sam Maguire, who’ve been to a final, who’ve won a league. And then on top of that, a load of young boys coming through who’ve been winning or competing at minor and under-21 and who have only known Armagh as a successful county since they were kids. What a perfect mix to pull together.

“So whenever you think about it all, which you obviously do once you finish up and look back and wonder what you should have done differently, it’s remarkable. It’s absolutely remarkable that we fell so far off.”

It wasn’t just that they couldn’t win Ulster. It was more that they went from race leaders to being shelled out the back of the peloton in double-quick time. It was bad enough that last year was their first trip back to a final since 2008; it was worse that every other Ulster county had been to at least one in the meantime. With the exception of Antrim, they’d lost to every county. They went from the most feared team in Ulster to one everyone could handle.

When Kieran McGeeney’s side opened last year’s championship with wins over Antrim and Cavan, it was Armagh’s first time putting together back-to-back wins in Ulster since, yes, 2008. They have won 11 games in the province in 16 seasons; five of them have come since April 2023.

There were times in his life when Kernan couldn’t believe his luck. When Armagh won their All-Ireland in 2002, he was living every boy’s dream. He had the inside track with his father as manager and he was on course himself to carry on the legacy of his heroes. He joined the panel in 2004, won his first Ulster in 2005 and was Young Footballer of the Year at the end of that season. By 2008, he had three Ulster medals and was part of the International Rules team. Everything he was supposed to be, he was.

Spin the tape on five years and his heart was broken with it all. Kernan found himself standing in a dressingroom tunnel in Salthill on the verge of tears, trying to summon a few words for the press after another summer had ended short of Croke Park. When he was done, he couldn’t even bring himself to get on the bus home.

“It was so frustrating,” he says. “That’s still one of the biggest regrets I have with Armagh but it typified how it felt at the time. I genuinely felt like I was done. I couldn’t take it any more. I just remember feeling like I was going to explode. I couldn’t think straight.

“To not go home on the bus with the rest of the team is obviously terrible. I had never done that before and it’s not something that I would accept from any of my team-mates. I was annoyed at myself afterwards when I had settled down. But that was where everything was. I was just so annoyed and frustrated at where we were going and how far we had gone down from what we were used to.”

Part of the problem was that Armagh had had it so good for so long that they found it hard to cope with not being the natural party of government. McDonnell’s departure after two defeats from two games in the 2009 season was messy. Paddy O’Rourke and Paul Grimley came and went. Every year that saw them crash out of Ulster to the first half-decent team they came across was another reminder that they weren’t who they used to be.

“I remember being at a team meeting after we lost to Derry in 2011,” Kernan says. “Eoin Bradley scored a goal from a long ball in and we were going through the video and Paddy turned to one of the boys and said, ‘Why didn’t you go to block that ball?’ And the boy said, ‘It wasn’t my man kicking it.’ And I just went, ‘Here, don’t even talk tactics to me. That’s the problem.’

“I don’t care whose man it is, if you’re right beside it, you block him. We were getting too fixated talking about tactics. Tactics were an excuse. The reality was, we just believed our own hype. We thought we were great after beating Down in the previous round after they’d been to an All-Ireland final the previous year. We were a pale shadow and we flopped.

“And that sort of thing just kept going for the next decade. We always thought we were just about to turn a corner. We thought we were the team that had gone before us. But we needed to forge our own identity and to put the fear into other teams the way the generation before us had done.”

There was a slightly odd anomaly to it all as well. Armagh came to forge a much better record against Ulster teams when they met them in qualifiers as opposed to when they played them in the provincial championship. They haven’t beaten either Tyrone or Donegal in Ulster since the mid-2000s but they’ve put up two wins each against them outside the province.

Crunch the numbers and the pattern presents itself. Since that 2008 final, Armagh have played 64 championship games, winning 32 of them – a 50 per cent winning average. Filter those stats for matches solely in the Ulster championship and it falls to a shade over 39 per cent (11 from 28). But filter them instead for games against Ulster teams in qualifiers and so on and the number is a hair over 53 per cent (seven from 13).

“I definitely think we found ourselves some years overthinking it,” Kernan says. “We put so much store every year into the first round of Ulster. The league would end and you’d have four or five or sometimes six weeks to obsess about the first championship game, you’d be drained by the time it came around some years.

“And then you’d go into the qualifiers and it would be week-on-week and you wouldn’t have time to overthink it. Looking in from the outside since I finished up, I think it tended to suit them better.”

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The wheel turned eventually. Nobody has won more games in Ulster over the past two seasons than Armagh. They’re back in an Ulster final after only losing last year’s on penalties. Three shoot-out defeats in the past two years has understandably made them wary, as has the fact that they contrived to lose the Division Two final against Donegal from a winning position. But they’re here with a chance on Ulster final day. They had plenty of years of being elsewhere.

“I’d say the mood around the county is very reserved,” Kernan says. “Maybe it’s the fact that there has been setback after setback, people are just sitting back and saying, ‘Let them at it’. Everybody is hoping to God that this will be the one that finally gets us over the line.”

When it happens, it won’t be before time.