Christy O'Connor: Armagh's 2002 All-Ireland winners changed the GAA 

ON THE Monday night when Armagh returned to Armagh city as All-Ireland champions in 2002, Benny Tierney, the goalkeeper, told the huge crowd about the inches, and of how the Armagh squad had finally clawed their way to victory and into a utopian state.

Sports fans had always been aware of the famous Al Pacino speech about inches in the American football movie Any Given Sunday but it really entered the GAA lexicon after Armagh made it public just how much those words meant to that group of players.

Pacino’s speech touched a deep nerve with them because Armagh spent so many years fighting and battling and scraping for those inches that, when they were all finally added up, those inches eventually made the difference in those players securing immortality.

After spending nearly two decades in the doldrums, Armagh eventually made the breakthrough in Ulster in 1999 but successive Ulster titles were defined by harrowing All-Ireland semi-final defeats to Meath in 1999 and Kerry (after a replay) in 2000.

When Armagh lost to Galway in a qualifier a year later, the whole day was a fiasco. The Garda escort that was supposed to arrive at Na Fianna’s ground on the Mobhi road never turned up.

The bus only pulled into Croke Park just before throw-in. Armagh had barely even time to warm up but they still only lost to Galway – the eventual All-Ireland winners – by just one point.

When Joe Kernan took over that autumn, nothing was left to chance anymore. He took preparation to a whole new level. Kernan’s support structures were unprecedented in their detail and volume.

Before Armagh were due to play a Tyrone side, which had romped to the league title, in the 2002 Ulster championship, Kernan took the greatest gamble of all, whipping the side off to La Manga for a training camp.

A few weeks earlier, Armagh had lost a Division 2 league semi-final to Laois in a hapless performance. The trip cost twenty thousand pounds and it seriously risked Kernan’s reputation. It worked.

Armagh went on to win another Ulster title but crossing that final frontier was a whole different challenge, especially against a Kerry side that looked unstoppable after hammering Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final.

At half-time, the story looked to be heading for the conclusion everybody expected. Kerry were well on top.

The body language was poor in the dressing room until Kernan famously took out an All-Ireland winners medal presented to a Wexford footballer in 1916 and showed it to the players alongside the runners-up plague he received from the 1977 final hammering to Dublin.

He asked the group which one they wanted before smashing the plague off the wall.

The story was bound to be crystallised as an iconic part of the story after Armagh went on to win the match. That breakthrough win was one of the most memorable victories in the new Croke Park, but it also inspired Tyrone a year later to repeat what Armagh had done and finally win a first All-Ireland.

That great Armagh team changed the game. 

Tyrone proved their greatness throughout that decade when winning three All-Irelands but that was no surprise given the underage dominance they had enjoyed only a handful of years earlier.

POWERHOUSE

Tyrone have since gone on to establish themselves as a powerhouse. Armagh were finally back on the big stage again this year, losing an All-Ireland quarter-final to Galway after penalties and showcasing the potential that better days may be ahead once more.

Two decades on though, will Gaelic football ever see a first-time All-Ireland winning team again? When Tyrone won in 2003, they were the fourth first-time winners (alongside Donegal, Derry and Armagh) inside a period of just 11 years. They were all strong counties with huge footballing traditions but the prospect of even one breakthrough now is outlandish, never mind four.

The only side which has threatened to break the mould in the last 20 years and join that elite group is Monaghan. They were close to reaching an All-Ireland final in 2018, when they narrowly lost the semi-final to Tyrone, but it’s unlikely they would have stopped the Dublin machine which was powering to a four-in-a-row.

The population of the county during the last census showed it to have just over 60,000 people, which makes Monaghan’s double Ulster title success in the last decade and continued presence in Division 1 a triumph of resources, as well as making a mockery of the numbers game.

On the other hand, it also underlines the chronic level of underachievement from other counties with far bigger numbers and far greater resources, with Cork at the top of that list.

The big guns are still dominating. The gap between the top six and the chasing pack is increasing but this year’s championship showed that the standard is levelling off, and that the top teams are no longer as far ahead as everyone else.

This year’s All-Ireland quarter-finals included four Division 2 teams, while three of the four semi-finalists were either Division 2 teams this year or will be – in Dublin and Derry’s case – plying their trade in the second tier of the league in 2023.

It’s only 15 months since Derry were in Division 3. The Ulster title they won in May was one of the hardest provincial titles ever won, defeating three Division 1 teams, including the All-Ireland champion on their home patch, along the way.

Derry showed how outstanding management, proper planning and raw ambition can take a team much further than expected. Yet the days of first-time All-Ireland football winners looks increasingly unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. And maybe never again.