As the team bus rolled along the hard shoulder, Rory Grugan allowed himself to drink in what they had achieved in reaching the All-Ireland final.
“I don’t think there were too many people disappointed once they spotted it was us,” he says.
Grugan gave himself around 24 hours to bask in the moment. That night he watched videos on his phone of the celebrations and replied to the well-wishers.
On Sunday he dragged his aching limbs to a recovery session before watching Galway take out Donegal. With their opposition known, the countdown to Sunday’s All-Ireland final truly started.
Grugan is speaking at the Armagh media night – just two days after they beat Kerry – and the main theme surrounds Armagh’s resilience, but in recent years compared to the more distant past.
When McGeeney took charge, Armagh couldn’t buy a win in Ulster let alone get near winning the Anglo Celt Cup which had almost become the property of the county in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. From 2015 to ’22, he steered Armagh through eight forgettable Ulster campaigns, yielding just three wins and one draw in 12 matches. In his first four championships, they lost to Donegal, Cavan, Down and Fermanagh by a combined total 24 points.
Suddenly, they are back in the big time.
“That was a challenging time in that early part of Kieran’s management stint, we weren’t winning in Ulster especially.
“We grew up as a team watching Armagh win Ulster titles and you probably got a bit spoilt in the noughties that it was just the done thing and we really wanted to get to that level, get a run in Ulster, because we know how much the Ulster championship means to us as a province, so that was always disappointing.
“It’s easy to say now after the fact, but it did always feel like we were trying to do the right thing and I’m sure you can find interviews with me saying where it felt like the players had let ourselves down, as opposed to how we were coached or how we were approaching games, and that we flopped on certain days and had defeats that we wouldn’t have been expected.
“That’s why I always trusted that, and the ability we had to bounce back, beat good teams and go on good runs, it showed that we were doing the right thing.”
More recently, they’ve lost four big time SFC games on penalties. Still, the group stayed together and Armagh have kept coming.
“It’s cliched but we have created a group where we are all very close and we believe in what we are doing, and that is why people stick around.
“Given how we have lost games in the last two years, it would be very easy to walk away and say ‘enough is enough’ but the fact that boys have kept coming back later in their careers, we now have a group who have been through all of that, who keep coming back to the well, so that’s a testament to Geezer and the management and all of the boys.”
