WILL Armagh win their second All-Ireland senior football title on Sunday? If they do, the scenes of celebration will inevitably be stunning. They are incredible supporters.
It’s more than two decades now since the grass of Croke Park turned orange when thousands of delirious Armagh fans swarmed down from the stands and the terraces. They danced and sang and hugged each other out on the grass when the 2002 All-Ireland was won.
As Kieran McGeeney lifted the Sam, tears flowed down the faces of players and spectators, alike.
On that September Sunday in 2002, the broken dreams of previous visits to Croke Park disappeared into the air.
The fact that it was Kerry who had been vanquished made the victory all the more valued.
This was a road to victory that was long, winding and arduous.
Despite the fact that matches had been played under GAA rules in the county from 1886 and that a County Board had been established at a meeting on 24 March 1889, there was considerable opposition to the development of Gaelic football in Armagh.
Much of this early opposition came from the Catholic clergy, partly because of concern over Sunday play, partly over violence during games, and partly because of fears of the presence within the GAA of Irish republican separatists.
Cardinal Logue, for example, warned of the “demoralising effect” of the GAA, while a local priest told an April 1889 meeting of the Holy Family Fraternity at the Catholic Cathedral in Armagh that there had been a falling off in attendance at Sunday mass because of the “vile system of football playing that had come into vogue on Sundays.”
The priest lamented the drunkenness and quarrelling which, he claimed, usually attended such matches, and continued: “The devil had been at the bottom of secret societies such as Fenianism and Ribbonism; and when he found those detestable secret societies condemned and stamped out by the Catholic church, the devil then invented this Sunday kicking, which he knew was doing so much harm.”
Newspaper reports of fighting at matches lend credence to the claims of the clergy. So too does the fact that the first president of the Armagh County Board was Charles Cowan who was also the Head Centre for Ulster in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a member of the Supreme Council of that organisation.
If politics mattered to the members of the newly established GAA in Armagh, it did not overshadow the importance of the games.
In 1890 Armagh won its first Ulster senior football championship – Antrim and Tyrone were the only other counties to enter the competition.
They were duly fixed to meet Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final at Clonturk Park in Dublin on November 16, 1890.
More than 250 supporters took the train to Dublin to support their champions. They were accompanied along the way by the music of the William O’Brien Fife and Drum band. The sense of carnival ended when the ball was thrown in, however, as the Armagh men were soundly beaten, losing by 1-14 to 0-0.
Not alone did Armagh fail to score, reports suggest they failed even to move the ball much beyond their own half of the field.
Failure in Dublin proved a recurrent theme for several generations of Armagh footballers.
Armagh won the Ulster championship for the second time in 1902. On this occasion, more than 400 supporters, including three bands, travelled to Drogheda for an All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin, the champions of Leinster.
Again, the Armagh men were soundly beaten.
The defeat was attributed, at least in part, to the fact that the grass on the field was longer than it should have been and Armagh’s style of dribbling the ball and playing it soccer-style along the ground was significantly hampered.
Reliance on playing the ball along the ground was retained by Armagh footballers for longer than seemed the case in many other counties. Another distinctive feature of the game in the county was ‘dandle ball’, whereby players ran while bouncing the ball on the back of their hand.
According to Con Short, the historian of the GAA in Armagh, this tradition persisted at least until the 1920s.
By then Armagh footballers were enduring one of the most dispiriting losing streaks in the history of Gaelic games. In 1903 they lost the Ulster Final to Cavan in a second replay. Between then and the end of the 1940s, they lost 12 more Ulster senior football finals – including eight to Cavan, alone – and had not a single victory to celebrate.
Throughout the long losing streak on the inter-county scene, possibly the most galling defeat was in 1938. In that year, Armagh had dramatically defeated their long-time nemesis, Cavan, in the Ulster semi-final, before losing the final to Monaghan by three points. The match ended in some controversy with the referee, Hughie O’Reilly, himself a great Cavan footballer, having to be escorted from the field.
Everything changed in 1949 when Armagh claimed a stunning victory in the All-Ireland minor football final against Kerry. The highlight of the game was a wondrous goal struck by the team captain, Seán Blayney, who slalomed through the Kerry defence from midfield before shooting to the net from 21 yards.
The victory was enough to propel Armagh to overcome their hoodoo in senior football in Ulster. More than 30,000 spectators turned out to see Armagh’s young team take on Cavan’s established stars in the 1950 Ulster final.
A marvellous match led the Anglo-Celt newspaper to note that “if Gaelic football was played regularly like this, there is no field game in the world to touch it.” Armagh won by four points and, amidst tumultuous scenes, every player was carried shoulder-high to the dressing room.
The great promise of the Ulster campaign was swiftly followed by huge disappointment in Croke Park when Armagh were swept aside by Mayo.
It took three years to recover sufficiently from that defeat to make it back to Croke Park as Ulster champions and, on this occasion, Armagh qualified to play Kerry in their first ever All-Ireland senior football final.
A massive 86,155 spectators attended the match, with a further 5,000 estimated to have been locked outside the ground and restricted to gathering around loud speakers to listed to Mícheál Ó Hehir’s radio broadcast. What ensued was a narrow defeat to Kerry and a whole host of regrets.
There were to be more regrets over the years that followed. The 1960s was stained by infighting between clubs and the outbreak of the Troubles brought a further tragic dimension to the story of the GAA in Armagh through the 1970s and beyond.
The greatest physical symbol was the commandeering of the GAA pitch in Crossmaglen; in time this became a totem of the wider struggle within the north and the militarisation of ordinary life. It spoke, too, of the reputation of South Armagh as ‘Bandit Country’ (a term used in 1975 by Merlyn Rees, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to describe the area) as a stronghold of the IRA.
In a footballing sense, the nadir was reached in November 1973, when Armagh arrived in Carrick-on-Shannon to play Leitrim in a league match, with just 14 players, two of whom were goalkeepers.
While a 15th player was found to allow Armagh compete, it seems remarkable that within four years the county had regrouped to the point of reaching an All-Ireland final.
If the late 1970s are remembered as the era dominated by Dublin and Kerry, the arrival of Armagh in the 1977 All-Ireland Football final was a triumph of determination, even if it was to end in defeat. An extraordinarily colourful match ended with Dublin beating Armagh by 5-12 to 3-6; Armagh could still end 1977 reflecting on a fifth Ulster championship.
In the end, it was to be the 1990s when the greatest era of success came to the county. The success began with the rise of Crossmaglen Rangers who, under the management of Joe Kernan, were transformed from a successful local club to the most decorated club in the history of Gaelic games.
And from that brilliant team Armagh constructed a county team which finally fulfilled the promise shown by generations of footballers in the county. Armagh won seven Ulster championships between 1999 and 2008. This was a phenomenal achievement in the context of the most competitive era of Ulster championship football in history.
The Holy Grail of All-Ireland success finally came, of course, in 2002 when that second-half surge took Armagh past Kerry. That more All-Irelands did not follow was a significant disappointment.
Now though, their captain on that day – Kieran McGeeney – is back, this time as manager. The pursuit of glory in Dublin lives on.
*Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin
