Donegal’s easy pickings in Armagh Orchard

Armagh 0-8 Donegal 2-11: There was a time when it was Donegal who were the hopeless romantics and Armagh the dealers in dashed dreams, but those roles have long been reversed and never more so than yesterday afternoon in this lopsided Ulster quarter-final.

Armagh folk congregated in the growing belief that half-a-dozen years in the wilderness were behind them. It took Donegal just two minutes to sow debilitating seeds of doubt into that theory. By half-time, home ambitions stretched no further than damage limitation.

This has already been hailed as a statement of intent by the reigning Ulster champions, but it was more than that. This was Ulster’s latest superpower crushing the buds of revolution and claiming payback for all those painful defeats to the Orchard County in the noughties.