Tom Humphries hears from several Armagh stalwarts about losing to Kerry in 2000 and the lessons learned

Eaten bread is quickly digested and never spoken about by the time the dessert trolley comes around. Armagh go to Croke Park this afternoon as almost perennial Ulster champions; they travel as favourites in the tepid-to-hot range to beat Kerry.

And in Armagh, where once there was famine, this opulence is taken as what is due.

Brian McAlinden remembers 1977 and the innocent excitement which surrounded Armagh's journey to the guillotine which was Croke Park on All-Ireland day. Afterwards they grieved lightly. There'd be more Septembers, and soon, to get their heads together.

Fast forward. In 1996 McAlinden and Brian Canavan took over a team which had lost to Derry by 10 points in the previous year's championship. They'd been playing at home. By then it had been 14 years since Armagh had last won an Ulster. In 1991 they had lost to Down in a dreadful game in The Marshes. Down had gone on to win that year's All-Ireland. Then Donegal. Then Derry. Then Down again. Such suffering.

Diarmuid Marsden made his debut in 1993. He was young and it was a good year. Not a very good year but a decent one. Armagh played six championship matches. Drew with Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal. Donegal were All-Ireland champions and they dumped Armagh out in the Ulster semi-final replay. Not so bad, thought Marsden, it's a start.

Armagh won one championship game in the next four years. They beat Fermanagh by a goal at a time when beating Fermanagh by just a goal was like being told you had weeks to live.

Benny Tierney remembers championship days when lads would slap him on the back and say, "Ye were beat out the gate but, ach, well, yiz gave it a lash. Fair play to ye for tryin'. Yiz never gev up."

And by 2000, when Armagh were Ulster champions for the second year in succession, the memories of the bad times had receded quicker than a spring tide. Swoosh!

"By 2000," says Benny, "we had women coming up to us who hadn't been at the match and jabbing our chests saying, 'What did yiz stand back and defend for in the second half? What did yiz do that for?'

"You'd say it was Kerry we were playing. Kerry usually have their own ideas."

Still. That millennium-year adventure provided a large down payment on the house Armagh would build. When Armagh won the 1999 Ulster title the glory was sufficient unto the year. The era of the Two Brians had begun in 1996 when McAlinden and Canavan took over the management of a team notable mainly for its harmlessness.

McAlinden and Canavan used 70 players over the next couple of years. There were problems of cohesiveness. At first Mullaghbawn were going well in Ulster and the club's players would become available only late in National League campaigns and would have to be integrated quickly. Then Crossmaglen took off as a phenomenon and the Two Brians could circle a date sometime after St Patrick's Day for when they'd first get hold of the Cross boys.

Progress was slow. They lost the first year to Derry but narrowed the gap from the 1995 beating. In 1997 Armagh lost to Tyrone by the width of a goal on a day when Armagh had 18 wides. In 1998, eureka, they beat Down in the first round. They went no further but a win was a win.

So 1999 was celebrated splendidly and when they got to Croke Park and lost to Meath having been level until Ger Reid got sent off midway through the second half nobody felt it was the end of the road. Except Tierney.

"I distinctly remember the dressingroom afterwards. I was the only one crying. For me it seemed like the end. I'd played for 10 or 11 years and won nothing. The Ulster was vindication. I didn't know if we would do it again. I was thinking of fellas like Martin McQuillan, who played for 14 years and won nothing and gave it up for 1999. An Ulster would have been enough for Martin."

The following year was different though. Armagh marched through Ulster and when the Anglo-Celt Cup was handed over to them they scarcely glanced twice at it.

"It would have been very intense that year," says McAlinden "We had a strong belief in ourselves that if we could make it back to the latter stages two years in succession we had a great chance of making that step further. The expectation was very, very high."

Marsden remembers seeing the Ulster trophy and realising McAlinden was effectively disappearing it. Within half an hour of the final whistle the Ulster championship was forgotten.

Marsden caught the mood and liked it. He hadn't played in the Ulster final and was desperate to be part of what came next.

"I'd wrecked my ankle in the Ulster semi-final. I really shouldn't have been playing for the rest of the summer. I did everything I could to get playing though. I had a ruptured ligament and I was going down to Dublin a few days a week doing intensive physio with Alan Kelly just trying to get the ankle back. It was a time factor. The diagnosis was that I would be right for late September or October time scale, but playing for Armagh it seemed those chances didn't come along very often. I had to be ready for August."

In Croke Park Armagh's orange orders swamped the green and gold on the terraces but down on the field the side appeared to self-combust. After just five minutes Kerry were ahead by 1-3 to zilch.

In the second minute Andy McCann had conceded a penalty to Johnny Crowley. Armagh respected Crowley almost above any other Kerry forward. McAlinden remembers travelling to Limerick to play Kerry in a challenge one night and ordering Justin McNulty to stick like skin to Crowley. He remembers a goal Crowley scored when he took the ball with his back to the goal and half a metre of space between McNulty and the endline. And suddenly with a sonic boom he was gone. Crowley could really sow panic into Armagh and now he had won a penalty.

In the Munster semi-final against Cork, Dara Ó Cinnéide had scored two penalties. Benny Tierney had studied them.

"Dara had put them both to the one side. I remember the management team saying to me, 'So are you going to go right if Ó Cinnéide gets a penalty?' and I said, 'Well maybe he might go left this time.'

"By then though everybody in South Armagh had the TV and the electricity. If I went left and he put it the other way . . . So we agreed I would go right and I remember as he ran up thinking that this f**ker is going to put this kick left. And because I had agreed and said I'd go right I was in a panic. Do I go left now? If I go left and then he puts it right maybe a sniper will take me out from the crowd. I knew just before he hit it that he was going left."

Ó Cinnéide went left. Goal.

It was a strange game. For a while Armagh looked as if their nerve had vanished. The legacy of the series would be that Armagh emerged with a reputation for sitting back on a lead. In the first game though Kerry sat back until Armagh had composed themselves.

Kerry didn't score from the sixth minute to the 24th, by which time Armagh had drawn level. Armagh went to the break a couple of points down but starting to truly believe.

Then five minutes into the second half Maurice Fitzgerald appeared as a replacement for Liam Hassett. His influence would be devastating. His first significant input would be a goal scored after Mike Frank Russell and Crowley had set him free. It was a sublime score.

"He got the ball on the left wing," says Tierney, "and came towards me. When we came off the field I was sure the goal had come off a deflection because I prided myself on being able to read what way a player was shaping with his foot to shoot. It looked like he was going to curl it around my right but it went left. I said to Kieran Hughes, 'Did that hit your foot?' He said no. I said, 'Well, it took some deflection.' I looked at it on TV afterwards and it didn't. He sold me completely. He finished it like a god and made me look like a plonker."

Fitzgerald's strike opened the gap to four points again. Marsden was on the field now.

"I came on. You think you're fit but it's hard to know. When you get out into Croke Park though the whole atmosphere surrounds you. Adrenaline keeps you going. You lay your hands on the ball a few times and you're fine. I thought we could have got through it that day but Kerry had new defenders that year - Michael McCarthy, Tom O'Sullivan, Tomás Ó Sé. They were tough."

Marsden exerted an influence as Armagh scrambled back. John McEntee floated a free which Tony McEntee knocked down to Marsden. His shot was saved by Declan O'Keeffe. "As far as I remember I hit it straight at him."

Then in the final minute Marsden finished a move by feeding Andy McCann, who crashed the ball to the net. Armagh were level, and with the next attack Kieran McGeeney came through for what looked like being the winning point in an extraordinary game.

Armagh have since felt unfairly punished by refereeing decisions in Croke Park, but they got a good run that day especially when Crowley was hauled down again in the second half.

Perhaps John Bannon was compensating somewhat when he allowed three minutes of injury time. Armagh certainly feel the contact Paul McGrane made with Denis Dwyer in the dying seconds of that injury time didn't merit a free from where the ball landed. They saw Maurice Fitzgerald walk over and take the ball in his hands. They knew the ending already.

"Any other free-taker had a chance of missing it," says Tierney. "Look at 2002 and Ray Cosgrove. I knew Fitzgerald was sticking it over though. We were walking off the field and I knew Maurice from playing Sigersons and he came over and said, 'Alright, Benny?' And I said to him, 'Maurice, you hateful bastard. Any other man in Ireland and it might not have gone over.' That was Maurice Fitz for you."

Between the draw and the replay Armagh was gripped with fever.

"Some sections of the media starting portraying things we were doing between the matches," says McAlinden. "The local press went crazy. The general public believed it. There was talk about us running hills and beaches between the games. Talk of crazy training sessions. It upsets the team. It has an effect. We believed we would take the extra step though regardless."

"Things went a little crazy alright," says Tierney. "The boys had nothing to write about for all those years and then we drew with Kerry. They made hay."

The replay followed a different pattern. Armagh dominated for long periods. For the final 10 minutes of the first half they reverted to their familiar two-man full-forward line, leaving just Oisín McConville and the recuperated Marsden inside.

A minute from the break Marsden unlocked the Kerry defence and fed McConville for a goal. Armagh were rampant. McConville scored 1-2 in three minutes to give his side a four-point half-time lead, which Cathal O'Rourke stretched to five early in the second half.

Kerry had answers. Russell was in his pomp and when Fitzgerald, on as a sub again, delivered an extraordinary pass to him late in the second half, Tierney came out to narrow the angle. But instead of attempting to go around the goalkeeper, Russell just shot on sight. Tierney remembers the ball taking an age to cross the line.

"It was one of those games where we were in touch and couldn't stick the final crucial nail in the coffin."

It lurched to extra time. O'Keeffe pulled off another miraculous save. Armagh flagged. Mike Frank scored another goal. It was done. Over.

"People in Armagh forget that on the second day we were five points up," says McAlinden. "Cathal O'Rourke missed a 40-metre free to put us six up. The public in Armagh forget at the end of the second game it was a draw. What beat us - and Páidí Ó Sé said this to me - was they had a stronger, more experienced bench."

Kerry brought on Liam Hassett, Maurice Fitz and Tommy Griffin that day. Armagh missed a series of chances to put the game away. It became conventional wisdom that Armagh had sat back and defended.

"I wouldn't say we bottled it or that we really sat back," says Marsden. "The second day we played better than the first. We missed chances before half-time and the killer punches came in extra time. We had a strong defensive unit. Maybe we had a habit of relying on them but it was nothing preplanned or preconceived. Kerry pushed forward. We got out of the habit. We did turn around and play the game to the death and go for scores more than sitting back and defending.

"In Armagh for months afterwards the first question was, 'Why did ye sit back and defend?" says Tierney. "I was going to tape an answer and just hand it to people and press PLAY. Listen nobody pushed a button and said 'defence'."

More importantly than the postmortem was the feeling that defeat left Armagh with. They knew Kerry weren't celebrating beating Armagh in a semi-final. They knew there was a different mindset at work there.

"If we'd got the win in 2000 we might have snowballed," says McAlinden. "The pressure and the expectation was phenomenal. What they took away from those games was knowing that they could match anyone. Armagh teams always looked up to Kerry and Dublin. This team saw that it was a level playing field."

The Two Brians stayed for another year at the county board's behest. A mistake, McAlinden feels.

"I felt that, personally, we had brought the players as far as we could have in our six years. We were asked by the county board to stay on. We did. In hindsight I don't think it was the right decision. To be fair, the players had given us all and we had given them all. I felt 2000 we should have stepped down."

Even so they almost caught Galway in a qualifying match the following year. Galway went on to win the All-Ireland the third year in succession that Armagh had been beaten by the eventual champions.

"Those Kerry games were about building up a reservoir of knowledge," says Marsden. "It was all stuff we experienced together. There's only so much a manager can do. A lot is down to the players. We took a lot from those games."

"Maybe," says Tierney, "years and years of failure came back to haunt us in the second match. But Kerry did to us what we have been doing to teams lots of times since. We learned that."

As usual Tierney retired after the game. He reckons it was his fifth year in a row to announce to the lads well that's it for me after the championship ended. Ray Morgan, an old mentor from Down, rang him and put him straight: "Listen, Tierney, you don't retire till you're told to. You never know what's going to happen."

Two years later he had his All-Ireland medal.

"If we'd been facing Kerry for the first time in the 2002 final I'm not sure we would have won it, but we knew we had improved and we were playing Kerry without Maurice Fitzgerald, the greatest forward in the country. Even when they galloped ahead of us in the first half we had no fears. The games in 2000 stood to us and went to making us a stronger bunch."

Now Armagh go to Dublin favourites to beat Kerry. The rap on Armagh is that they are old, but just three players survive from the 2000 games. Seven Kerry players came through that series.

Times have changed. Armagh are big enough to scarcely demur at the favourites tag. Marsden is gone coaching his club side. Tierney will do the stats for Joe Kernan today.

"It was definitely time to go when the skintight jerseys came in."

Self-awareness has served them well.