All week I’ve been feeling confident about Galway’s chances, which is obviously an intolerable way to spend the week before an All-Ireland final in which your county is involved.
This is a time for pointless worry, stress, irrational concern about matters too trifling to be an issue at any other time of year.
But a Zen calm had settled over me. I felt like Galway would be made to work hard for victory, but that victory would nevertheless be forthcoming. Nothing I had read or heard swayed me from this opinion. I needed to be awoken from this contented, self-satisfied frame of mind. I needed to have my eyes opened. I needed, in short, a trip to Crossmaglen.
We set off on Wednesday morning to meet Oisín McConville, about as self-assured and confident a footballer as there has been in the last 25 years. If we were looking for someone to tell me that Galway have no business thinking they could win this game, then Oisín was surely that man.
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I had been to Crossmaglen once before, when he was in charge of the Crossmaglen senior team alongside John McEntee. In the winter of 2015, I went up to the Ulster club final between Cross and Scotstown, and saw them just about outlast the Monaghan champions after extra-time.
That final was played in the Athletic Grounds in Armagh, and after the game I wanted to go back to the town. I put it into Google maps, and was given 4 routes, none of which seemed to be on anything approaching a national primary road.
We drove dark lanes through the black South Armagh night, had a pint and waited a couple of hours for Oisín and his team to come back from their post-match meal. In the end my travelling companion and I cut our losses and went home as a freezing fog descended, with only the beginning of an understanding of what football means to this town.
Yesterday, notwithstanding the summer rain that swept in intermittently, the old market town was en fête. When we arrived around midday, there was a ‘hats, flags and headbands’ vendor on three of the four corners of the square, all doing a roaring trade. Later in the day there was a queue snaking all the way along one side of the square into Shortt’s sports shop.
The kerbs, even the lines on the road, were all painted orange and white. When we met in the Crossmaglen Rangers clubhouse, a well-hit 45 from the square, Oisín told us that if you stood still long enough in Crossmaglen that week, you were in danger of getting painted orange and white.
This was the atmosphere that RTÉ and BBC Northern Ireland try to convey on their trips to the counties involved in the All-Ireland every year, but no matter how comprehensive the television report, nothing compares to feeling it in the air of a town. Our Crossmaglen correspondent told us as much: “Everyone’s optimistic all of a sudden – there’s no one grunting at each other in this town the last two weeks.”
I was asked what it was like in Galway. For Crossmaglen in Armagh, read Tuam in Galway – a town just big enough for all the football-mad lunatics of the surrounding area to congregate in. The talk is of tickets (scarce), and information on injuries (even scarcer).
I outline to Oisín my reasons for believing this will be Galway’s day. Padraic Joyce’s record against Ulster teams – 14 wins, and 2 draws in 19 games against northern opposition. They have already had the experience of losing a final in 2022. They are a patient, well-drilled, highly-efficient team. They have kick-out options, they have defenders to foil Armagh’s top forwards, they have an arch-spoiler in John Maher (an incomplete description for a very fine footballer) to handle Rian O’Neill.
Most importantly, having looked back at the three championship games between these teams beginning with the 2022 All-Ireland quarter-final, Galway have been the better team for 75% or more of those games.
The results reflect something closer, but Galway people feel good about this final because they have played a lot of very fine football against Armagh, not least earlier this summer in Sligo, without Damien Comer. They were in complete control of that game for an hour . . . until one kick-out went awry. Armagh were given an opportunity and they went ahead and took it.
I made my argument for as long as I thought it took. I could see Oisín listening intently, with equanimity. He began his retort. He does not see the Galway defence holding the Armagh forwards. He looks at the Armagh bench and sees match-winners. He sees an ideal match-up for every Galway forward, with the exception of Comer . . . but who knows how fit Comer will be? He sees the surge of belief that went through the county and presumably the team in the aftermath of that win over Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final. Armagh are focused, ready, and battle-hardened.
He looked at me with exactly the same Zen calm that I had been exuding all week. We can’t both be right – and only one of us, it hardly needs mentioning, has scored the winning goal in an All-Ireland final. I blinked first.
If I went up the road in search of a niggling doubt or two . . . mission accomplished. Perfect.
