Serious operator quietly powers Armagh's surge

Armagh v Laois: Keith Duggan hears how midfielder Paul McGrane has evolved into a player regarded as a key component in the Armagh success story.

'It would have been a high price to pay, surely," declared Paul Grimley of Armagh as he imagined the Ulster champions facing Laois this afternoon without Paul McGrane.

In a way, it is difficult to contemplate those famous orange shirts taking the field without their grave and taciturn midfielder. Since his debut year back in 1993, McGrane has developed the reputation as the Mr Consistency of his patch, the consummate, ever-reliable man for all occasions.

The Armagh management have rightly been troubled by the amplifying insinuations that their team is reckless and overly physical and that they engage in that most loaded of GAA phrases, "dirty play".

But McGrane's record through the years was, much like his demeanour, understated and impeccable, and that his name should have emerged as one to be hauled over the coals after the incendiary free-for-all that engulfed the Ulster final replay was a surprise.

McGrane was yellow carded for a challenge on Tyrone's Philip Jordan, but that punishment was later heightened to an automatic red after the Central Disciplinary Committee ruled he had intentionally struck Jordan in challenging for the ball.

For a week, it seemed McGrane - as well as his young team-mate Kieran McKeever, would be destined to miss Armagh's quarter-final game against Laois, a match of inestimable importance for Joe Kernan's team.

"Paul was fierce upset, he was distraught really when word that he had been suspended came through," confirms Grimley. "The thing about McGrane is that he is as honest as the day is long. And it was hard to see a tackle like his misinterpreted and dealt with by a committee of people who were viewing it out of context of the game.

"And I think it was shown with the video evidence from the Cusack side that there was no intent in the way Philip Jordan was tackled and you could clearly see that the height of Paul's hand was at the same level as the ball. There was no malicious intention there. That would not be Paul McGrane's way."

As it happened, the complicated and controversial internal judicial review that overturned Ryan McMenamin's suspension during that Croke Park replay indirectly facilitated the availability of the Armagh men.

Just as Armagh were resigned to planning for the last and most solemn episode of what has grown into a quixotic search for greatness without McGrane, he was back. Overnight, Armagh seemed a more solid prospect again.

The importance of McGrane to his team is sometimes hard to quantify. While the skill of Steven McDonnell is often luminously evident and the uncanny, full-throttle style of Francie Bellew regularly the most conspicuous element of the Armagh defence, McGrane slots in as the centrepiece of the Armagh engine so steadfastly that he sometimes seems unnoticeable.

"He never does any one thing that's wildly outstanding," John Gildea chuckles down a phone line from his office in Milford. "But it's the hundreds of wee things that he does right time and time again that makes him what he is."

The former Donegal midfielder broke through among the same generation of players as McGrane and toiled against him innumerable times, from the broiling days of Clones to the deliciously wintry pleasures of the McKenna Cup.

"As it stands today, McGrane has to be among the top two or three midfielders in the game. Like a lot of players in that position, he improved with experience. He is strong and smart, he takes the right options and he is very difficult to knock off his game. And like, I would have to say a gentleman. Goes about his business, talks away to his own players surely, but he never gets into any guff with opposing players.

"And I have been on the losing end to him a few times and he was always very sporting about it. I saw the tackle he got suspended for and it never crossed my mind that he was trying to hit his man there."

Gildea had not heard that McGrane's suspension had been erased. That is partly because the Glenties man, retired from the county scene since last summer, is immersed in the club championship and because the announcement was so low key that it passed a lot of people by.

"That's a fierce boost for Armagh," he reckoned. "That puts them back on track. McGrane is a serious operator for them."

Kieran McGeeney is the most vocal and prevalent of the Armagh senior players but within the Armagh camp, it is generally acknowledged that McGrane shares the same platform as the Mullaghbawn captain.

After winning the All-Ireland in 2002, the Armagh squad held a ballot for the players' player of the year, voted upon by all 30 squad members and management, and McGrane dominated the polls.

Officially vice-captain, he led the side during McGeeney's long and at-times-unpromising recuperation from injury last year. Upon his return, McGeeney assumed the symbolic armband, but when Armagh remorselessly collected a fourth Ulster title in six years, both men raised the Anglo-Celt Cup together, a visible manifestation of McGrane's place within the Armagh dressingroom hierarchy.

Although McGeeney is often portrayed as being conservative and ferociously singular, he is like a rock-and-roll exhibitionist in comparison to the midfielder, who has perfected the art of just fading into the background once he leaves the field.

You have to trawl long and far through the archives of this newspaper to a league game in the late 1990s to find McGrane's thoughts on record, when he previewed a league semi-final date against Dublin with some guarded references to working hard and hoping for the best. That is his entitlement: practically anyone who has encountered him testifies to a deep sense of modesty.

But the core foundation lies in his ambition and the same celebrated devotion to the idea of excellence that McGeeney is so often tagged with. And because McGrane espouses that virtue so quietly and constantly, he has become a revered figure among Armagh fans down the years.

John Morrison knows McGrane better than most. The evolutionary football coach and sports psychologist whose fingerprints can be powdered at the scene of most positive developments in Ulster over the past 15 years first saw McGrane when he was 15 years of age. Morrison had set up a school of excellence in his native Armagh in 1988, back when the Orchard County was just another struggling Northern exponent of the game and Morrison was derided for the grandiosity of his scheme.

At 15, however, McGrane bought into the notions of self-improvement and belief and principles that inform Morrison's sporting philosophy, and that school was the beginning of an enduring relationship between the two men.

Morrison went on to carve a reputation as perhaps the most innovative football coach in the game and it was when he was second to Mickey Moran in Donegal that McGrane called him, distressed about his seemingly diminishing ability as a fielder.

Famously, Morrison met McGrane on a field and instead of throwing footballs for McGrane to haul down from the cold night sky, he blew up children's party balloons. They met for seven months.

"I enjoyed him tremendously, he was engaging company and just very eager to learn. The two things that needed changing were the position of his feet when he jumped into the catch and the trajectory of his arms when he met the ball. It used to be that his feet trailed, whereas now he jumps knee raised and his hands are in front of his face instead of straining behind his head.

"The reason for the balloons was that they just hang up there and they gave him a chance to get his radar right. With anything like that, you have to be really willing in order to break down your game and reconstruct it. Paul wanted to know what he could do. I told him I would have him hanging up in the air. And he worked at it. Then one evening after a club game, I think it was, he rang me delighted and said, 'John, I was hanging tonight'.

"And I have to say I always get a bit of enjoyment when I see him make a catch on the field that dates back to those sessions. He gave me a voucher for a restaurant for myself and my wife just to say thanks. And funny, I never used it. I kept it."

McGrane's evolution as a football player is pleasingly loaded with the principles of work ethic and patience. His potential was always evident - he had in abundance the qualities that Morrison has reduced to the acronym SPIT - speed, personality, intelligence and technique.

But his club, Ballyhegan Davitts, were among the worst in Armagh county football when he was a teenager. An uncle of his had played Armagh minor football in 1949 and two elder brothers, Stephen and Peter, were regarded as players of note. But McGrane's arrival as a senior club player, at the age of 17, was like rocket fuel.

"It is hard to explain," says Ballyhegan secretary Killian Morgan. "In his first year he won Division Four player of the year. Then he won the Division Three award. From 1992 to 1997 he took us from the bottom of Division Four to Division Two. We won the junior championship in 1995, the intermediate championship in 1997 and we were a senior club from then until 2003.

"Obviously, it is a team game and it is not to diminish what was a great collective effort, but it seemed like Paul would win man of the match in 18 out of 20 games he played. For a club like ours to produce a player with that kind of drive and ability, it just transformed the way we regarded ourselves."

McGrane was appointed Armagh minor captain in 1992 of a particularly charismatic group of players that included Diarmuid Marsden. He was man of the match in the Ulster final win and that September they lost a classic minor final when Meath conjured a last-minute goal into the Canal End.

That teenage loss assumed a disproportionate importance in Armagh, as if providing irrefutable proof that there was something about the psyche of their teams that prevented them from winning the ultimate.

"It was never spoken about," Morgan reckons. "I do know that some of those guys reckoned that had they won that year it might have sated them and possibly then they wouldn't have the same kind of desire they showed as senior players. But Paul never discussed it much."

Instead, he was brought into the senior panel under Jim McCorry and John Morrison. In 1993, emboldened by that gilded generation of minors, Armagh took the All-Ireland champions, Donegal, to the wire, exiting the championship after a replay. But from 1994 to 1998 Armagh won just two championship football matches. It is staggering to think of it now, but their 1999 victory over Derry was the first in 22 years.

Stoicism and inch-by-inch progression, at both club and county level, was the experience that shaped Paul McGrane, and having made the transformation from a team that regularly loses into one that boasts a formidable winning record, he leads by example in staying there.

"His sincerity comes out in training," says Grimley. "If we run 50-yard sprints, McGrane is like McGeeney in that he will run 60. That means he will run 50 flat out and slow down for 10 past the white line as opposed to the general tendency to ease up over the last 10 as you approach the line.

"And when you see that kind of example replicated in everything he does - everything - it does stand out and it does set a standard. It is a rare thing and it does come from within."

Against Tyrone, in the last seconds of the Ulster final, McGrane produced one of his most attention-grabbing moments, plucking a ball from the sky and firing an equalising point that served as exclamation mark to Steven McDonnell's shocking goal a minute earlier. It was a quintessential McGrane play, deceptively simple, deathly calm and precisely what was necessary.

"Underpinning a lot of Ulster football is a fear of losing," reckons John Morrison. "I think it still exists even in Armagh to some extent. It took a long time and a lot of effort for Armagh to stop knocking at the door and just burst through it and that steel that people see in the likes of Paul McGrane, that comes from not wanting to go back."

It was against Laois, the opponents today, that Armagh made the decisive changes before their historic 2002 championship. In losing that year's Division Two semi-final, Joe Kernan fielded a team that included Andy McCann at full back and Kieran McGeeney in at corner forward.

Armagh were lousy on the day, hitting only eight points. Paul McGrane, though, played at midfield and hit three points from play. The team was altered radically over the subsequent weeks and months, but the quiet man from Ballyhegan just kept on doing his thing.

It is a relief to all of Armagh that he will be in the same place today.