Loss of star man is a blow for Armagh, but not a fatal one to their All-Ireland hopes
Micheál Clifford
IN 2014, KERRY managed to do something that had even been beyond them in their storied history when they lost and won the All-Ireland in the same year.
They lost it before they even got to play in it when on a dank February afternoon in Portlaoise, Colm “Gooch” Cooper broke his knee-cap and ruptured his cruciate when playing for Dr Crokes against Castlebar Mitchels in the All-Ireland club semi-final.
Never shy of giving a bad weather forecast ahead of the harvest, this time the funeral tones extended beyond Kerry football’s eternally low pressure meteorological service, with universal unanimity that his absence would be fatal for the Kingdom’s chances.
Five years without an All-Ireland, the only tangible hope Kerry had taken from the previous summer was that their best player had shown that he was capable of reinventing himself as a centre-forward play-maker; a role he had interpreted with such conviction that he had hoovered up an eighth All-Star
All hope vanquished, then?
Six months later and Kerry were champions again by finding another way to win the All-Ireland they had lost.
If there is an echo of that season, it might be found in St Tiernach’s Park Clones on Saturday evening, when Armagh – despite Antrim’s valiant but doomed effort earlier this month – get their All-Ireland title defence on the road for real when they eye-ball Tyrone for a place in the Ulster final.
Kieran McGeeney’s intimation back in March that Rian O’Neill, who had returned briefly to training the previous month, would not be seen this summer appeared to be the final word.
‘“I would doubt it. I would doubt it; he has his own stuff going on,’ said McGeeney, when pressed on O’Neill’s chances of playing this summer after his team’s penultimate round league defeat to Kerry.
That might amount to being well shy of open and shut, but in a new game played to the rhythm of a breathless schedule, time has never been less friendly in facilitating unexpected comebacks.
As with Cooper, even on a star-studded Kerry side, O’Neill’s image and presence dwarfed all others around him dressed in orange, at least in the public mind.
Three seasons ago, when he finally tapped into all that potential that had been evident in his debut season in 2019, he became part of a Galactico fantasy football full-forward line with David Clifford and Con O’Callaghan for company.
In reality, though, that was a forced fit, although not necessarily in a negative way in that the 24-year-old Crossmaglen man is not an out and out strike forward.
The sight of him last July in the All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry, playing effectively as a third midfielder and turning everything he touched into gold, kicking three booming points and a miscued effort for another inadvertently leading to Barry McCambridge’s match changing goal all merely served to set up his final play.
Ahead by two but with Armagh folk still peering through their fingers as Kerry sent a final Hail Mary into the square. O’Neill rose imperiously from his goal line, almost finding extra hang time for effect, to swallow it up.
In that moment he morphed into Michael Murphy’s successor.
The irony and genuine fear within Armagh is that as the original of the species returns, their version is no longer there which is likely to be a tipping point in a championship as finely balanced as the one up north.
And there is no sugar coating that O’Neill’s absence is a huge blow, but there are many reasons to believe that it is one that is also well shy of being fatal.
For starters, unlike Clifford – and to a slightly lesser degree O’Callaghan – Armagh’s level of dependency on O’Neill is at a much lower level to which Kerry and Dublin are exposed to.
True, given his skill-set, he was perfectly placed to exploit a game that now places a greater reward on the ability to win contested possession and score from range, but it is not as if that is an area of dire need for Armagh.
There are, with the singular exception of Galway, fewer imposing physical middle eights in the game with the likes of Ben Crealy, Niall Grimley, Ross McQuillan, Tiernan Kelly, Jarly Og Burns and, of course, O’Neill’s older brother Oisin, while this is a team that is coming off a championship win in which it converted five two-point dead balls.
That is not to say that O’Neill will not be missed, but there are obvious ways and means of filling that hole which, for example, might be a lot more challenging if the mercurial Rory Grugan was not available.
Above all, the very idea that the All-Ireland champions would lean so heavily on one talent is the very antithesis of what Kieran McGeeney has built and what Armagh football is about.
Even going back to McGeeney’s playing days, Armagh may have had a team of some rare talents – Stevie McDonnell a prime example – but they were a dressing room that leaned on collective will rather than a sprinkle of magic dust.
After all, their best player was a powerful, uncompromising centre half-back, who was profoundly impactful but hardly the kind of presence which postered boyhood walls. This team is even less so.
This is a group whose player of the year nominee after winning the All-Ireland started out the season as a sub and whose winning goal in the final – and naturally it was set-up by a sub – was scored by a full-back whose name would barely have resonated outside his parish at the start pf the year.
They will miss O’Neill but those who believe that they will be definitively diminished in his absence miss the point of what Armagh is about.
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