HE looked into that singing, swaying crowd last Sunday and saw his daughter Ella.
The delight in her eyes, the pride on her smiling face…
“My daddy won the All-Ireland!” She’ll be able to say that for the rest of her life.
His partner Maria, his dad, his brothers, his niece… He could see his nephews up on the Hill close to where the BBC were interviewing him.
The tears were close, he had to turn away.
“It was getting too much,” says Stefan Campbell.
Emotions came like a tidal wave because all those people were there for him through the bad days too.
Seven years previously in 2017 he had walked off that same Croke Park pitch a beaten man and the scene couldn’t have been more contrasting.
Armagh had been humiliated by Tyrone. Hammered by 18 points. By the auld enemy!
Off the pitch there was turmoil too.
Six years before last Sunday he had walked out of a bookies hating himself for placing another bet.
Stefan Campbell, the fella who seemed to have everything going for him, lived a double life. Football was what we saw but behind the mask a gambling addiction was devouring him from the inside out. His time was spent trying to hide it from the people closest to him.
THAT loss to Tyrone turned out to be a crossroads in his life. He quit the Armagh panel after it. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind to commit to county football so he spent a year playing soccer for Lurgan Celtic and wrestling with his demons.
He went to his local bookie and banned himself from the premises.
“Don’t let me come back in these doors,” he told him.
But there were other doors so he went to New York to play for the Westmeath club. Being out there meant he had no access to gambling and that helped him put some distance between him and his addiction.
He placed his last bet on June 17, 2018.
“I was unrecognizable as a person,” he says.
“I had a rough six-to-12 months, a rough year but I finally found the courage in 2018 to open up.”
He posted on Twitter in March 2019 that he hadn’t placed a bet in nine months. Honesty was his policy and the support he received from friends, teammates, fans and many others inspired him to kick the habit for good.
“I had played in New York in 2015 and that was probably the only time I never gambled in 10 years because I had no access to it,” he explains.
“It worked for that summer and maybe a month or two after but I relapsed and then it was a constant then from 2015 right through to 2018.
“It went from… scary figures (of money) like.
“But the Moore family reached out to me in June 2018 and I had a two-week period to think about it and where my life was going. I made a promise to myself that this was it and I plucked up the courage (never to gamble again) when I was actually in New York.
“My family were a wee bit worried about me and we were exchanging texts and phone calls and plucked up the courage to come clean.
“They had a rough idea what I was going through but not to the extent: the numbers, the debt, the credit cards etc. And as soon as I came home I set it out and they asked me what help I needed professionally and said: ‘Whatever is required’.
“And I looked them straight in the eye, and said: ‘No, I can’t get any lower, I’m going to do it for myself’. The rest is history, six years later.”
GAMBLING is history and, seven years after that Tyrone defeat, all Armagh’s disappointment and coulda/shoulda bad days and ‘should Geezer go?’ and the chokers’ tag and penalties and all the rest of it is also history.
It wasn’t losing to the Red Hands back then, it wasn’t even losing the Ulster finals or All-Ireland quarter-finals on penalties that made Armagh swear ‘never again’. It was losing this year’s Division Two final to Donegal.
Sitting there in the changingroom after coming close again but being beaten again the players promised themselves they’d return to Croke Park and they’d win and they’d keep winning.
And that’s what they did.
“People keep talking about the heartache of the Ulster finals but we sat in that dressing room after the League final in Croke Park and we knew that we would be back in a matter of weeks for a quarter-final,” says Campbell.
“We promised ourselves we were going to come back here and win three games back-to-back and that we were not going to lose in this place again because we had too much pain and we’ve done it.
“That was the moment, people keep referring back to the finals and the losses in the penalty shoot-outs but it was actually the League final that we lost in normal time that was the moment.”
You would go a long way to meet a more affable character than ‘Soupy’ and no player has earned an All-Ireland more than the Clan na Gael maestro. The darling of the Armagh fans, he is a natural talent, a genius with a ball in his hands.
Blessed with explosive pace, he can score off either foot and has the vision and game-intelligence to play passes like the one that set up Aaron McKay for the match-winning goal in Sunday’s final.
Despite all his skills, the Lurgan native had to bide his time. He was called into the Armagh squad in the summer of 2011 but didn’t feature until the McKenna Cup the following year.
It was 2013 before he got a Championship game and many of the years after that were nothing to write home about. He even missed the only other trophy of Kieran McGeeney’s 10-year reign – the Division Three title in 2018.
Despite setback after setback, Campbell says the Armagh manager – who took over after the 2014 season – has constantly preached ‘Sam Maguire’ to his troops no matter what.
“I never met anyone like him and I don’t think I ever will,” says Campbell.
“He has been beating the All-Ireland drum for 10 years and he knew fine rightly back then it wasn’t possible.
“I would only judge Armagh from 2019 onwards. We got to the quarter-final in 2014 against Donegal, lost by a point, and then he came in full-time in 2015 and everyone was expecting us to kick on.
“We lost the first game, we never won a game in Ulster for three or four years, maybe five or six was it? He is manipulative in a way, like he will make you believe in something that you don’t believe yourself.
“He has been beating that drum for a long time and even though he knew at the time, it wasn’t achievable, the turnover of players, myself, Rory (Grugan), we all left at various stages…
“Rory went to study, you had the retirements: Aaron Kernan, Tony Kernan, Finn Moriarty, Charlie Vernon, Brendan Donaghy, Ciaran McKeever… Like, how are you supposed to compete?”
YOU know that saying: ‘You can learn more in defeat than victory’? Well that’s how it was for Armagh. They were out of the 2019 Championship before the end of June but it was Sam Maguire contenders Mayo that put them out. And only by a point. And in Castlebar.
From that moment on, Armagh knew they could compete with the top teams.
“That was the first big one that we lost and we knew we were close,” says Campbell.
“You looked at the age profile of our team and there was something big possible. We got the exposure against a top, top team and we were obviously devastated after that because we went so close.
“Then ‘Star’ (Kieran Donaghy) came in after that and we just improved things bit by bit ever since, we added a layer to it every year.”
From that point Armagh have been on the march. They broke their duck in the Ulster Championship, returned to Division One, reached back-to-back All-Ireland quarter-finals and Ulster finals and finally, and brilliantly, wrote their names in the history books by beating Galway last Sunday.
A twist to the tale is that Campbell didn’t start the last four games. He lost his place after Armagh had convincingly beaten Derry at Celtic Park. He could have grumbled, he might have walked, but he didn’t. On the contrary, he embraced his new role as an impact sub.
He missed out on the parade and all that but on the sideline he worked hard and smart so he’d be ready to make an impact from the moment he stepped on the field.
It’s not the role he would have chosen for himself but he played it brilliantly and made vital contributions – match-winning contributions – in the semi-final and final.
“It’s one of those things,” he says.
“I started most games this year and I lost my place. I started against Derry and I had a quiet game and I couldn’t get back in.
“People are saying to me: ‘You missed out on the starting 15 and the parade’. But I trusted Kieran from when I was 21/22 years of age. I’m now 33, and if he thinks Armagh’s best chance of winning Sam is me coming on off the bench… You know, that’s what’s going to happen.
“He told me 10 years ago in the club, when he was presenting me a Player of the Year trophy (he was guest speaker): ‘You’re going to be winning me an All-Ireland’.
“I was just like: ‘Yeah, yeah, dead on…’ and went and enjoyed the night with the boys. He reminded me of it coming off the field: ‘What did I tell you in the club?’”
HE describes the sensation of winning the Sam Maguire as “an out-of-body experience”. Who knows when it will sink in, the longer it takes, the more it can be savoured.
“I was talking to Oisin McConville on Sunday night,” he says.
“He bought me a bottle of beer and I just asked him: ‘When does it sink in?’ He goes: “Yous lads have no idea. Until yous get to a bar, or someplace secluded by yourselves and maybe watch the game back and have a laugh and slag each other. Then you are going to sit back and realise what the hell you have done’.
“It was great to hear from him and I was glad I asked the question because it still feels… I’m still shaking, it’s an out-of-body experience and it is something I will never forget, obviously.”
Having come this far Armagh aren’t going to let the Sam Maguire go easily. You better believe it will have to be prised out of Aidan Forker’s hands now and already some of the players have spoken about getting back to pre-season and going again next season.
Will ‘Soupy’ be there? You can’t believe he won’t be. Even if he wanted to retire, it doesn’t look like Forker would let him.
“Although I might look a bit younger than I am and my behaviour might suggest otherwise, it has been a long journey, a lot of miles on the clock,” he says.
“It’s funny, 2019 was the first time I was used as an impact and there’s a guy in the club, a previous county player, who told me: ‘You’ve done enough, time to retire – focus on the club’. That was 2019!
“I was 33 last month. Aidan said to me at breakfast: ‘You’re not going to be one of them: one-and-done’. We’ll see.”
Maybe his daughter Ella – who came along when he was 20 – will make the final decision. Time spent with her is time well spent.
“I said to her last week: ‘If we win it, what do you think? Will we go again?’” he says.
“And her response was: ‘I want you to play on. However, it means another year where I won’t see you…’
“I left that conversation thinking: ‘It’s a lot’.
“Me and her mum aren’t together now. We go between houses. She’d be in my house four or five days a week anyway, but we are passing ships. You don’t see that growth.
“You can be a wee bit envious of the guys on the team who have younger kids now. They are going to see them day-to-day, year-to-year. I haven’t seen Ella grow up really but she told me on the Hogan it was all worth it, so all is good.
“There’s nothing I’d want more for her than to represent her county, to wear the orange jersey. I wouldn’t mind her going through the same heartache to reach that goal, that utopia that we are all feeling now.”
It took him 12 years to get reach utopia. Would he do it all again?
Of course he would.
