A comfortable Cross to bear

Keith Duggan witnessed a jubilant but far from frenzied homecoming asArmagh brought the Sam Maguire Cup to their heartland, Crossmaglen

The Sam Maguire arrived in Crossmaglen at 7 p.m. on Monday, September 23rd, at the precise time that was promised. Those who knew Big Joe said that even the magnitude of the day would not disturb his famously conscientious sense of punctuality.

Attention to detail is what sets Joe Kernan apart. He wasn't going to abandon that principle in his finest hour.

The expectation around the streets was almost as sweet as the moment when the cup became a physical presence in the town. Earlier in the afternoon, in one of the pubs off the square in Cross, Gene Morgan had a single finger raised. A neat whiskey sat in front of him. Gene played in the 1953 All-Ireland final when Armagh lost to Kerry. Above him on the wall there is a colour sketch of that team. Gene kneels perpetually in the left-hand corner, lean and dashing with that of-the-era gleam.

He has seen five of the men in that picture buried. "Once is enough," he is saying. "We never won it before and we might never win it again. But I am glad I lived to see this day. Once is enough."

Gene is sharp as a razor and effortlessly mingles observations of the final he watched from the dead centre of the lower tier Hogan stand on Sunday and the match he played in 49 years ago. He marvelled at the new Croke Park, unrecognisable from the stadium that he graced. He thought he had seen it all when Armagh had another penalty saved. He worried for Oisin McConville.

"History repeating itself like that. I thought of Bill McCorry and his miss in our game. I didn't want Oisin to be remembered for that miss. The way he took it up in the second half, it was incredible. They were all brilliant. Tony McEntee was the difference in winning the game and losing the game. I didn't think I would live to see it."

Gene says Crossmaglen has not changed much physically over the years. Its focal point is the square, which is bordered by solid, early 20th century townhouses common to all Irish market towns. But in the past 30 years, Cross has taken a grip upon the imagination and has often been portrayed as the epicentre of the darker nature of the Republican movement. Lives were lost in bursts of exact violence in the very town square that now bustles with celebrants and a real, electric happiness.

The British Army watch-tower still looms over the town, a weird and symbolic juxtaposition beside the Rangers football pitch where the victorious Armagh team will be presented before the crowd.

Paddy Shortt was put in charge of finance when they decided to build a stand for their pitch around 1949. The population of the town was about 800 then and the club hadn't a bean to rub together. Paddy is the proprietor of one of the most authentic Irish bars on either side of the border.

Witty and articulate, he became a cause celebre during the most poisonous times of the Troubles when visiting media often solicited his opinion. His visitors' book is crammed with journalists and TV crews from every corner of the world. Paddy always thought it was a sad kind of fame that Crossmaglen attracted. Like the rest of the local people, he detested the reputation foisted on his town as a wild and ungovernable place.

The term 'Bandit Country', coined by Merlyn Rees in 1975, stuck. When Bill Clinton was visiting in 1995, Paddy got an invitation to meet him at a reception in nearby Dundalk and his heart sunk when an RTÉ reporter told the president that he was only six miles from bandit country.

"How could anyone like a name like that? But the truth is that we didn't have a great name. That was why this is so important to us, it is one of the best days ever. The most pleasing thing is the amount of strangers that have come here and got to see that Cross is just a friendly country town. People were saying to me that they were surprised, that they had been scared of here before and couldn't believe the reception they got."

And it is true. People are inquisitive here in an old-fashioned, country way. No one stands in a pub long without the offer of a drink. All anyone wants to talk about is football.

There may be 10,000 people in Cross and the entire homecoming operation is handled by local volunteers. There is absolutely no policing.

"We never really had any policing here. But there was never any robberies or rapes or whatever," says Paddy Shortt. "People looked after each other. It was the same with this homecoming."

The team's arrival is orchestrated perfectly. The Sam Maguire Cup spends little more than half an hour in Cross, leaving for Keady precisely on time.

Kernan is the first to address his hometown crowd. Amicable and helpful, Joe has always firmly refused to politicise football. So he makes no mention at all of the watch-tower overhead.

"A lot of people thought this day wouldn't come," he shouts through a microphone. "Especially not a lot of pundits and people down south, they didn't believe we had what it takes to win an All-Ireland."

Down South. It is a curious phrase but common around Cross and lends the impression that the south is a great distance away as opposed to a few short miles.

"It might as well be," laughs Paddy. "Ah, to a lot of people, down south is just a polite way of saying Free State."

"But to beat Dublin in their own back yard," continued Joe, his voice straining, "and then the might of the Kingdom is something. We went through the front door, the way anybody should go into a house."

Mad cheers. Centre forward John McEntee, whose parents run a newsagent's in the town, steps forward and tells the crowd, stretching back to the far end of the field, that for the players, the homecoming will remain as memorable as the match. Then everybody sings The County of Armagh.

The mood is of fun and mischief. A local farmer dyed one of his cows orange and the other green and gold. Word went round that the Kerry cow calved sometime on the Sunday. They are still trying to decide upon the origin of the new born. A local man gleefully recounts how he told a radio reporter that the police sergeant had been the fitness trainer to the team. He wasn't sure if the reporter fell for the story but he wrote it down. He advised him to knock at the station door and inquire about it.

On Wednesday, at the GOAL charity match, it will transpire that Pat Spillane's mother makes an unscheduled appearance at half-time. Pat's comment about his mother being faster than the Armagh full-back line rankled. The crowd will watch as a pantomime version of Mrs Spillane lines up against each of the defenders for a race. The players let her win.

With the Sam Maguire still fresh in town, however, there is a wonderful 15 minutes of enchanting dusk light when the team bus edges out of Crossmaglen, down past Big Joe's house and up the narrow road to Keady.

"There is no through road to Cross," notes Paddy Shortt. "In other words, you have to come here on purpose. Hopefully people will come here more often now. This will help break the barrier or whatever. It's just great for Cross to be coming out on top. It's a very emotional thing for all of us. Football, see, was always the one expression of nationalism that didn't have to be political."

When the bus is crawling towards Keady, an army helicopter drones high over Crossmaglen for the first time in hours. Down below, the party continues regardless.

In Armagh city, Oisin McConville looks out on the ecstatic orange blanket and remarks, with deadpan humour: "There's a few about all right."

A massive crowd is standing on the local rugby grounds, which has a long association with the Armagh GAA. Des Fitzgerald, the club PRO, explains that the club has a long reputation for cross-community gestures. He believes this All-Ireland win will further that.

"It has captured the imagination. A friend was telling me a story of two ladies in a Presbyterian church discussing Armagh's performance in the semi-final against Dublin. He reckoned there was hope for the country yet if the Armagh footballers were the talk in Presbyterian churches."

Although the Armagh players are drawn almost exclusively from the nationalist/Catholic parishes of south Armagh, captain Kieran McGeeney has publicly expressed the wish that the feel-good atmosphere will drift to the non-GAA strongholds.

"I hope so," he says at 1.15 a.m., exhausted but still delighted. "I'm no politician, I'm far from it. You needn't bring it into sport because the parameters of these things are such that none of us know the ins and outs of things but I would hope that people would celebrate this with us and get some pleasure out of it as well. In fact, lots of people have, people who were not brought up with Gaelic football have taken immense enjoyment out of this."

If Joe Kernan is the architect of Armagh's win, then McGeeney has been identified as its very furnace. Quiet and modest, McGeeney has become the metaphor for the Armagh story. People see a rare quality in him. Fellow sportspeople rained messages upon him. DJ Carey called. Padraig Harrington sent words of admiration. His old friend Anthony Tohill just said: "Geyser, Go for it."

In the lobby, his father was explaining the nickname. It dates back to primary school when the teacher asked the class what a geyser was. McGeeney was the only child who knew and the others never let him forget it. Pat tries to explain the nature of his son.

"Yeah, he comes across as serious but he's not really. Kieran is shy and he doesn't really enjoy a lot of the attention that comes with the football. Football is his life. He says himself that his brother Pat was the better player but would never give to football what he did."

Pat senior played some junior football for Crossmaglen but as his son noted before the All-Ireland final, "probably grew up in a time when football wasn't a priority."

The game, reckons Pat, wasn't as important when he was young. He relates a story he heard from Jimmy Smyth about the Armagh team going to play Leitrim in 1973 and the bus driver ended up making the first 15. He was on the field when Kieran lifted the Sam Maguire, lost and jostled in the crowd but his heart singing way above them all.

"Just to see them two arms in the air. It was the greatest feeling," he says. He intended driving back from Armagh city to Mullaghbawn in the early hours of Tuesday morning for work in the morning.

There are Mayo people and Tyrone people, Wexford, Kerry, Donegal and Dubs in Armagh on the Monday evening, all to empathise with this small, famous county on what is a historic night.

Because of Armagh's size and geo-political divide, there is no week-long cavalcade of homecomings to every town and village. The Sam Maguire will be brought to parishes like Silverbridge and Clann naGael in quieter ceremonies. The plan for Tuesday is that the players will officially break up and head home to rest.

Armagh looks pretty at night, with the cathedrals lit but it is has a distinct feel to 'down south.' After midnight, the very shutters of life come down. At 2 a.m. centre streets are deserted, a very different scene to the lingering chaos that follows All-Ireland wins in other rural provinces. It is striking how many windows have wire-mesh protection.

As Paddy Shortt says: "The border is only a few miles away but it's a different world."

But the afterglow of what happened in the 2002 season will remain as permanent in the minds of south Armagh folk as the bittersweet All-Ireland final losses of 1953 and 1977.

"Anyhow," Paddy Shortt says, "nobody will mind what happens after this."

Not that anyone is hanging up the boots. Crossmaglen seniors were scheduled for training on Thursday night and a full attendance was predicted, rain, hail or shine.