Waking up as an All-Ireland winner this morning, Armagh midfielder Ben Crealey felt that a decision he took to abandon his family’s traditional sport of choice for football had been justified.
The Orchard County won the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship for just the second time after they defeated Galway 1-11 to 0-13 in the decider yesterday.
Rallying was Crealey’s first sporting love but that had to be put to one side when he started playing senior football with his club, Maghery Seán MacDermott’s.
“My Dad never kicked a football in his life. I’d take him out in the garden a few times and he’s not a great sight to behold with a football, but in a rally car he’s different,” Crealey said.
“I grew up racing go karts and rally cars and football was always sort of a second thing for me until I started playing senior football with my club.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, he said it was a difficult choice to prioritise football over rallying when he was called into the Armagh squad.
“Rallying would’ve been my family sport, so it always felt a wee bit more natural to me compared to football, so it was hard to step away from it.
“But mornings like this morning make it all worth it,” he said.
However, it was a much different sort of family affair for Jarly Óg Burns, whose father is GAA President Jarlath Burns.
In the run up to the final in Croke Park yesterday, Jarly Óg said he and his father did not speak about the match at all.
“It’s weird dynamic in our house. To be honest, there is just zero talk about football. That’s just the way it is because it’s such a big part of our lives when we go out of the house.
“Whenever we’re in the house we just nearly want to get away from it. And he knows – he’s been a player – that you don’t want to talk about Armagh or football when you’re away from it,” Burns said.
He added that it was important to block out all the noise surrounding the team because if they had not “you know you’re in the wrong headspace”.
“Thankfully, he knows, and I wouldn’t listen to him anyway he doesn’t give great advice,” Burns joked.
But the Armagh team were well prepared by management for the pomp and ceremony of All-Ireland final day in Croke Park.
“On Tuesday night, Paudie put on the speakers in the Athletic Grounds, and we had the whole crowd noise and the music that they play in Croke Park in the warmups,” Crealey explained.
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Highlights of Sunday’s final
“We had all that when we were running out from the tunnel, and we were lining up as if we were shaking hands with the President [and] doing the full parade.
“I think there was a 15, 16-minute gap from warm up until throw-in and we prepared for that on Tuesday night … and we threw it in for a training game then.”
Both players described feelings of satisfaction upon hearing the final whistle yesterday, feelings that will take a while to sink in.
“The thing that happened yesterday doesn’t happen too often in this county and when it does happen, we’re going to enjoy it and take it all in as much as we can,” Burns said.
“That was the one thing past champions in Armagh said to us, ‘just take it all in and enjoy it’. Days like that really don’t come around a lot.”
Crealey said that he will take “loads of special memories” from the day, particularly seeing his partner for the first time in nine months after she Australia.
“I was just exhausted at the final whistle … just a sense of satisfaction. All the losses over the years and the bad defeats and trying to pick yourself up after it every night going to training. When the final whistle blew it was immense satisfaction.
“We’ve been through a lot as a team and the word I think that would describe us is ‘resilience’,” he said.
Crealey added: “We got together last Saturday in Johnstown Bridge and went through some deep stuff and hard times that everyone’s been through personally and collectively in their lives.
“The message was, if we can come through that, we can come back and we can win this thing and thankfully that came through.”
