Armagh: a lot done, more to do

THE Armagh bandwagon may be turning into a juggernaut, but Joe Kernan wants everyone to keep a calm head.

There is a lot of hard work to do yet if they want to become the first team in over a decade to hold onto Sam Maguire.

“We played well but made an awful lot of mistakes and I told the players we are going to have to improve a lot more if we want to retain the title,” Kernan assessed afterwards.

That seems a little harsh. While Laois were gallant, Armagh’s grip on the trophy never really loosened yesterday.

But Big Joe won’t be satisfied until his entire team play to their capabilities.

Yesterday, Croker lay in anticipation of Steven McDonnell’s explosion. He never ignited. Instead, Oisin McConville, Diarmuid Marsden and Philip Loughran carried the responsibility. It was McConville’s best display in an orange shirt in an age. Kernan duly noted.

“It is good to see Oisin back to full fitness and he had a great day.” The strength of the holders lies in their ability to call on others to take up the mantle when bigger names have an off-day.

“If somebody is playing poorly, there is someone else to pick up the mantle,” Enda McNulty remarked. “That has been the way it has always been with this team. We don’t go out worrying that we need certain players to perform.”

McNulty responded well to the difficult task of marking Beano McDonald, even if the Laois prodigy was the losers’ best player. “Beano is a good player, he slipped away from me a few times, went to tackle another man and he slipped away, popped the ball over the bar a couple of times. He’s an quality forward and playing in a quality team.”

Certainly, all the sounds coming from the winning dressing-room about the Leinster champions were positive. “Laois are a good side and they are going to get better,” Kernan said. “They always had good footballers in Laois, it only took someone to get the best out of them and Micko has certainly done that.”

For the moment, Kernan is happy talking about his team as not quite the finished article. It may be human to err but as long as Kernan sees errors on the football field, you sense he will never be totally content.

“The players showed a lot of character, that’s the make-up of this team. We have something, we don’t want to let go of it. But, we know there is more in tank, you can always improve on what you do. While the effort was great, good commitment from the players, took some nice scores, we still made enough mistakes.”

Philip Loughran, whose maturing displays are the chief reason for most believing Armagh to be a better team this summer than last, feel as the bigger games come, the team is going to get better.

“The more you go on, the bigger the games become,” says Loughran, whose performance yesterday even eclipsed the calm industry of Paul McGrane. “The bigger the game, the bigger the challenge for us and we have been responding to those challenges. We can improve, it is going to take a lot of effort to up our game again, but we need to, so there is going to be a lot of hard work done over the next few weeks.”

Aidan O’Rourke agrees that Armagh still have to slip into top gear. “We didn’t play wonderfully well, thought there was more scores in the side. But, this has been a progression. I think it was our best performance of the year.

“And we are progressing with each game,” the half-back said. “The early qualifying games, when we weren’t meeting the bigger teams, certain things weren’t going well for us and we worked on those. And those things have improved, but there is more improvement in this team.”

One area where there is a perfect record is the concession of goals. None so far in the championship. Goals win football games and if your opponents aren’t getting them, well they can’t win. Obviously, the Armagh defence know the reputation they have acquired, but it is not something they talk about.

“The clean sheets aren’t something we have talked about. We all have it in our heads, I’m sure, that we haven’t conceded a goal,” O’Rourke said. “But it is not something we have particularly worked on.

“The defence as a unit though, not just 1-7 but 1-15, has contributed to that. The work-rate in the forward line is amazing, our full-back line is very settled now, it is our best full-back line. They have a lot of critics but we know the job they do.”

Criticism of this Armagh team was easy to come by earlier this summer. In a clinical fashion, they have shut each and every mouth. They have done so playing football based on simple certainties.

Slowly, we are grasping the certainty that whomever wants to take Sam off Armagh will have to battle them for it. And there isn’t a better battling side in the country.