Bradley: we’re ready for Armagh

DERRY’S footballers have experienced wildly differing fortunes from spring and summer in recent years and Paddy Bradley is hoping that correlation can stretch into a third season as they face into a championship opener against Armagh on Sunday.

Though they finished as Division One champions in 2008 and runners-up 12 months later, the Ulster county saw their form dip appreciably in the subsequent championship campaigns, exiting the provincial campaigns at the semi-final stage.

This year has been different. Though they claimed a comprehensive victory over Tyrone in their opening league game, they suffered five successive defeats before a last-day win away to Galway which failed to keep them safe from the drop.

“It was disappointing to get relegated,” said Bradley, “but we’ve done well in the last few league campaigns and it didn’t do us much good come championship so we’re not too down.

“Damien said all year we’re preparing for the championship. As soon as April, May comes around there’s a spring in the step and we have a lot of boys coming back from injuries so we should be going with a full hand.”

The return of forwards like Enda Muldoon, Mark Lynch and Declan Mullen has been of particular interest to Bradley who, with brother Eoin, has had to bear far too much responsibility for Derry’s scores in recent years.

They will need a healthy spread of contributors on the scoreboard against an Armagh side which was only one point away from sharing Down’s claim of having the stingiest defence in any divisions in the league just gone.

It has been a frustrating decade for Derry all told and Bradley has been there for the duration. When he joined the panel in 2000, Derry won a league title and reached an Ulster final. They haven’t graced the latter since, let alone won one.

Then again, few counties have. When the decade was put to bed last year, Armagh had claimed six titles and Tyrone the other four and this weekend’s opponents appear to be on the up once again after a few years where they lost their way.

“It’s taken them a few seasons to introduce new players but they seem to be shaping up rightly. Mick McGurn is a fantastic trainer. He trained Ireland last year with the International Rules and I was in the shape of my life so, the fact he’s been with them since before Christmas, I can just imagine the sort of shape they’re in.

“They’ll be coming to Celtic Park full of confidence. I think they put a lot of emphasis on trying to get up to division one this year and they achieved that. They have a lot of new faces who’ve had a lot of game-time so they’ll expect to get a result.”

Regardless of who prevails, it will be asking a lot for the winner to negotiate a successful route from the preliminary round through to the steps in Clones – or Croke Park – in July.

Only Tyrone, in 2005, have managed it since the 1940s.

If the bookies are right – and how often are they wrong? – then it will be Tyrone claiming another Ulster title in nine weeks but there is clear sense that the province is ready for someone else to emerge from the pack in 2010.

“I was listening to Anthony Tohill on The Sunday Game and he expected someone else to come through, possibly Donegal. It is tight and even if you look at some of their results they’ve been very lucky to come out of some of those games. There have been a few games where we’ve been hanging in but luck has gone against us, maybe inexperience has gone against us, but we’ve a good mix of youth and experience which will hopefully get us over the finish line. It’d be nice to get to an Ulster final but we can’t look further than Armagh.”