All-Ireland SFC quarter-final/Armagh v Laois:Tom Humphries on the Armagh team that went up a hill three times before reaching the summit, only to discover there was a mountain to scale next time.
When it's over it's over fast. The cheering stops and you find yourself on your backside on the concrete. You think you're prepared for it, everyone does. Nobody is.
In May, Armagh went to Clones and they felt good. After a winter of chicken dinners they thought they were used to checking themselves in the mirror, twisting this way and that wondering if they were getting fat and complacent. They'd given themselves more rigorous examinations than any team could. Hadn't they?
The next thing Joe Kernan remembers is the same thing the team remembers, the same thought which somebody will vocalise any time they get too giddy about their resurrection. The next thing Joe Kernan remembers is the bus, inching its way out of Clones and blue and white flags covering the windows and Monaghan fans beating the bus. Inside they sat in a stone silence which was unbroken all the way home.
Kernan was king of the silence. Some days you have to say a lot and when it comes to the theatre of motivation there is no more colourful or effective player, but on other days you keep your words and thoughts to yourself and let the situation swamp your players. He didn't rescue them from their despair or offer them kind words.
He listened though. He waited for someone to say that, "hey it's only a game and wasn't it a good run we've all had and listen when was the last time somebody retained the thing anyway?" He waited to hear an excuse about injuries, about what might have been if Steven McDonnell hadn't rasped a post in the first half or if Diarmuid Marsden's fisted attempt on an almost open goal hadn't skipped wide. He listened and heard nothing. A little handful of reassurance to take home to bed.
They didn't have a team meeting, they didn't need to. A crisis would have been if they didn't hurt. A crisis would have been seeing the players grabbing handfuls of silver lining from the cloud. Instead they just came back gaunt and horrified.
It made Joe Kernan wonder. Not about his team. They'd been down so damn long that a little taste of that again was always going to straighten them up. No, he wondered about the system. He has never fully converted to the joyful cult of the qualifiers and now, as he grasped the rope ladder, he was still dubious.
"The story of our season is the story of what isn't right about it," he says. "The initial intention was to help weaker counties and to get them more matches. That's a good idea and it worked for a few. Generally, though, giving weaker counties 20-point hammerings two weeks in a row isn't much benefit. The stronger counties come out better. We got a second chance we probably shouldn't have got. I'm glad for it. The idea is great and we enjoy the extra matches."
(For the record Joe Kernan favours the solution offered by Martin McHugh: divide Ulster into two groups, five in one, four in the other and play leagues. Everyone gets three or four games, then there would be Ulster semi-finals and finals. "You can plan in advance, you have local derbies and attendances would be better on aggregate. You get the honour of winning the provincial title and clubs could plan their season too. Connacht one league, Leinster split in two. Munster one league. That's for another time though.")
They'd gone into the Ulster championship, he feels, on reflection, like dead men walking. Injuries. The back door. Sunshine holiday. Other managers he'd consulted had told it would be so, yet still it ambushed them, the extent of it. The injuries first. McGeeney had struggled all spring. Ronan Clarke hadn't played since the previous September. Then Oisín McConville's hamstring went kaput. And Enda McNulty followed him to the infirmary.
Three All Stars and a Young Player of the Year gone. What team wouldn't build in a little room to accommodate an excuse in such circumstances. And the system seemed to grant planning permission too.
"Without a shadow of a doubt. If you told us the morning of the Monaghan match there was no back door, well, I wonder if it wouldn't have been different. I think in the bottom of your mind, in some far off corner, you know you have another chance.
"At the end when you should be busting your gut some little voice tells you 'It's not over today. You have another chance.' I said nothing to them that day. They were sick and they were hurting and because of that we knew there was more in them. That's what we needed to see in them. The next few matches got us back into winning ways."
Luckily when they got found out they got found out early. The game with Monaghan was a preliminary game and they had a full month in which to mount repairs and get over the sheer shock of losing.
Subsequent Sundays out on the field didn't teach them much. Waterford, one of those counties whose pleasure under the qualifying system is to be whipping boys twice instead of just the once, were bundled off the premises and an Antrim team, respectable by Antrim's standards, were moved gently aside.
Those two low key games took the pressure off. Armagh played within themselves, uninspired by either the surroundings or the opposition, but almost subconsciously they found their rhythm again. Players came back from the sick bay, that sharpness which comes with every new week of summer suddenly became part of their armour. Kernan knew if his team were to have a long summer they had the football but they needed something big. Then Dublin and Croke Park came out of the hat. He knew it would appeal.
The challenge was pitched just right. Armagh had beaten Dublin twice in big Croke Park games and had little to fear. Yet the hype and the excitement and the attendance would all be huge. Dublin would be talked up. The prosaic nature of Armagh's summer would become a part of that process. Just right. He couldn't have hand-picked a better outing.
"The week of the Dublin match was different. Their faces had it. One week isn't enough to know your opposition but you know your team and these boys have been around long enough that they like a challenge."
The Dublin game was just the game they needed. It was never going to sit with them to go down there and be beaten on the national stage - "And if we came out of it with a win it would put a lot of the self belief back into the team". He watched them all week and watched their injuries heal and their hunger grow. He thought he recognised old friends amidst the ravening.
"You always hope. It takes a big match for you to find out what they have left. Some of our boys after Clones could have counted their medals. Then we were in trouble. The boys aren't made of that kind of stuff. Sometimes after a thing like that you know by the feeling. They were hurting and they stayed that way for a long while. It took for the Dublin game. We often remind ourselves of that day, coming out of Clones and the Monaghan supporters beating the bus with their flags. When you think of it you get a slight pain in the stomach. The thought of something like that happening in Croke Park. They are too proud a team."
He saw it that day, the practise of what he had been preaching. He saw a team which had matured while he wasn't looking, a team which had added wisdom over the winter of celebration and the spring of preparation.
"The way they played the game against Dublin, they showed me they had matured. That's the challenge for us. We have a team with 20, 21 fellas who have been around for quite a while. We either pack it in and say one All-Ireland is enough or we keep growing. We have to improve more and mature more and do things more simply.
"That's a question for this Sunday against Laois just like it was against Dublin. We have to go out and do it. The Dublin game and the Limerick game showed us that we can improve. Laois are on a roll. We know what that is like ourselves. We know that great teams can cope with that. We have to see if we can."
The Dublin game put them back in La Scala. They spent quite a while clearing their throats.
"In the first half I could tell we were playing better but we didn't play as simply as we could. Early in the second half I could see it, though. I knew we were back to normal. There is a steeliness in the team that is useful as far as we are concerned. All we want to do is play to our strengths: winning balls we shouldn't win, getting quick ball into the forwards. We want that ball in as quickly as possible. We started doing that."
That period was the rebirth of Armagh. There was a lot going on from the time the half-time whistle blew till Armagh established their pattern of dominance. Kernan insists Armagh were just taking care of business. What Dublin were doing wasn't of any great relevance. They scarcely noticed the Dublin players being held back out of the tunnel.
"That whole thing and what was made out of it is very unfair to Tommy (Lyons) and the players. A wee thing happened with an official just as the team were coming in and Tommy held all the players back. People said they were throwing in the towel and giving us the advantage but I think he did the sensible thing. Going down a tunnel didn't lose a match. If our players had got involved in anything I would have been furious. Nobody was looking for that sort of distraction just then. "
Similarly in the second half what Dublin did in terms of personnel switches after Steven Cluxton's sending off took a while to be absorbed. Armagh feel they probably would have ended up playing the second half the same way anyway.
"In a game like that, it's not about those small things so much as it's about your team," says Kernan. "I think the lads turned it around because from day one when I took this job I said they had learned how to lose. To make it worse, they were beaten three years in a row by teams that went on to win the All-Ireland. We'd had it all in terms of disappointment and character building. Knowing you were good enough to win three years in a row but didn't. That's a lot to brood on for a winter. That's a lot of character building. When it comes down to it, no team hates losing more than these boys do. It showed us. Backs to the wall it can be done, you have everything right, and get it right."
Since then things have got a little better every day. Armagh gave Limerick a bit of a roughing up a few weeks ago, in the sweetest possible sense. They were tough and they were sharp and Stevie McDonnell looked as good as he has ever been. Kernan likes the idea that they have been down in a trough and that the only way now is up. Keep walking that incline.
"The job doesn't get easier," he laughs. "I feel as bad every day. Without a shadow of a doubt! The boys have matured and come along, though. The injuries do you when you are facing into a season as champions and all you have to do is bite the bullet. Last year we had no injury problems. We kept quiet. Three All Stars and a Young Player of the Year. When I look back we went in and we were there for the taking. Fair play to Monaghan, they took us. The advantage is you grow from it."
In hindsight, Kernan thinks his team are in the best possible shape they could be in. Survival in Ulster would have meant attrition and feudal wars and border skirmishes all summer. Hard to know if any team could survive that. Instead they've had a chance to patch themselves together. "We would have lost much more by staying in Ulster. We might have come through patching players up as we went. Instead we have everyone in good nick, we got to play a few decent, low-profile games and we have the hunger."
All of which brings him back to his original problem. The qualifiers are great but . . . "I can see it. If the provincial winners start failing to win the All-Ireland for a few years and teams have the experiences we have had, or Kerry had last year, there's no doubt the provincial championships will become meaningless. We can't complain but that situation is there."
He talks about needing more for tomorrow, about the youth of Laois and the momentum they have. All problems he couldn't have dreamed of in May. These are unique years. Humpty Dumpty teams used to fall off the wall and all the sports shrinks and all the physios couldn't put them back together again. Now the way of the second chance is not just available, perhaps it is preferable.
