It’s likely the team bus made the same journey through the village that day, as did countless supporters.
In the late 1800s, McCrum successfully proposed the introduction of football’s penalty, much to Armagh’s recent detriment.
“The idea that the penalty was invented by a man from Armagh is not lost on a lot of people,” laughed Benny Tierney, Armagh’s 2002 All-Ireland-winning goalkeeper. “You have to see some humour in these things.”
Tierney brings levity to any situation. But even he couldn’t muster it on that last bus journey home from Clones. As a player, he and his colleagues had come away from the same venue and occasion as winners. They also, he stressed, had luck. This Armagh team, he’s sure, haven’t had any.
“You will rarely get that emotion again of playing but the disappointment levels for the boys [that evening], we could see their bus was parked beside us. We didn’t realise how fortunate we were,” he recalled.
Tierney, a one-time Mullaghbawn colleague of the Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney, happened to meet his 2002 captain a couple of days before the Ulster final.
“He was in good form and he was buoyant about the game. I said to him leaving, ‘I know we’re ready, we just need that bit of luck’. From a purist or punditry point of view, people look on luck as something that shouldn’t come into it.
“But if you look back to when we were winning, [Ray] Cosgrove hitting a post, Mike Frank [Russell] hitting McGeeney’s shoulder when the ball was going to back of the net, so many incidents that went our way that didn’t go for Kerry. Nobody looks back on that these days, it’s like a golf scorecard, you only see what you shoot, not how you did it.
“When it went to penalties [in the Ulster final], I’ll be honest I was sitting beside Diarmaid Marsden and I said, ‘Oh my God’. That sense of foreboding, the way things had gone.
“There’d be huge empathy for those boys who have been on the road as long as we were, who have been battling with McGeeney for all those years and they are not getting that bit of luck. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get you across the line.”
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And yet it hasn’t broken them. Tierney recalls sitting in between McGeeney and Paul McGrane on the bus on the morning after the 2002 All-Ireland final and listening to them plot ‘the next one’ already. And he can imagine that was McGeeney’s outlook in the days after losing to Donegal, that they’d go again.
“That’s the mindset of McGeeney. When we lost, he was the boy, and three or four others, who were able to bounce back. Resilience is a word not commonly used nowadays, he has it in abundance,” said Tierney.
It appears his team have it too. If anything, they have come out of this year’s Ulster final loss much better than 2023 when the circumstances were the same but the fallout should have been more harsh. As if a burden had lifted. First Westmeath, then Derry. They had been much more convincing than they were against the same Westmeath team and Tyrone 12 months earlier.
“You could see that against Derry,” recalled Tierney. “The shackles were off, they went at them. The level of athleticism and work-rate ‘Geezer’ gets out of his teams, that honesty of performance in Armagh. There are no slackers, I wouldn’t last. I don’t know how he would manage me personally! To come back the way they have, again. And there is excitement in Armagh again.
“It’s very hard to get over another Ulster final defeat but there is actually excitement among the supporters again and that’s only after two games.”
Armagh created up to eight goal chances against Derry, scoring three. They blitzed the league champions with crisp tackling and quick counter-attacking.
“They’re playing with more abandon than they’ve ever played with. We’re seeing really good attacking football from a supporters’ perspective, for someone who is looking on like myself with old age but with hope! There is that feeling that Armagh are now playing a style of football that is watchable but successful as well.
“We’re all great armchair warriors and social media warriors. But they’re getting a tune out of these boys. Look at [Rory] Grugan who is into his 30s and [Andrew] Murnin who is having the season of his life.
“We played Niall Grimley for the first time against Derry, Ross McQuillan came on and Tiernan Kelly started. What I liked about that is when you make big changes like that you expect the team to weaken, I thought it actually picked up.
“People probably don’t associate the management team with tactical success, I think it is built around a work ethos and pace. We have considerable pace at the minute with the likes of these guys who came on the last time.”
Armagh didn’t have Ciarán Mackin and Conor O’Neill, both gone with season-ending injuries, while Murnin also missed out.
Tierney has been taken by the harmony between Murnin and Oisín Conaty beside him, one of those players who has injected that additional pace into the team.
“I was involved a wee bit with Barry O’Hagan with the county U-20s, I saw this burst every time he got the ball. He has the legs of a sprinter. He’s built for fast-twitch, he’s the opposite of me basically! His 360-degree turn in the Ulster final, when he chipped it over, is something we don’t see on a pitch. He has no fear.”
The love for the team is back, he senses, not that it ever left. But the Ulster final did take it out of the support.
As they renew one of the great recent rivalries against Galway tomorrow in Sligo, a game that decides who tops the group, they’re mobilising.
“I don’t think there is a better-supported team. I went to book a hotel in Sligo the day the venue was announced and everywhere was booked out straight away.
“That’s the level of enthusiasm. It’s scary. And they are genuine supporters too.
“When you are scoring goals and bringing on people making an impact, you know that Armagh aren’t far away from where we want to be.”
