Armagh back for repeat dose

GETTING the hang of first round championship matches can be tricky. With no summer form to act as guide, these events are often unpredictable. One exception, however, is tomorrow's Bank of Ireland Ulster football championship meeting between Derry and Armagh at Celtic Park.

Two indicators spring immediately to mind. Firstly Derry's impressive League final performance four weeks ago confirmed the county's status as favourites for both the provincial and All Ireland titles. Armagh's only visible form at the same time was a singularly limp display in the McKenna Cup final, exacerbated by tactical predictability.

Secondly, the teams played 12 months ago in the corresponding fixture of Ulster's two year cycle. On that occasion, Derry won by double scores and devastated Armagh around the middle of the field. Despite a change of management in both camps, neither team shows many changes this weekend, compared to a year ago.

On the face of it, so, Armagh people have every reason to see the task in the gloomy words of one local observer as "mission impossible". Whereas Derry may not be, as perceived in some quarters, unbeatable, it's hard to see how this Armagh team is going to do it.

If you leave out of consideration the four players who retired in the wake of last year's thrashing, the changes to Armagh's lineup are curiously minimal. There has been a slightly weird rearrangement of the similar personnel, which leads hardly anyone to believe that they will start as announced.

The central difficulties of a year ago will illustrate what Armagh are up against. It wasn't so much that they were cleaned out by Anthony Tohill and Brian McGilligan in a straight fight for the dropping ball, but that having successfully stood up the physical challenge of the Derry pair, Armagh watched the opposing half lines devour everything that broke.

This time, Armagh are similarly robust but look no more likely to feed off the chaos - should they succeed again in disrupting Tohill and McGilligan.

Among the positions on the Armagh team which some find puzzling is Ger Houlahan at centre forward. It's not that he's unfamiliar with the position but that he's unsuitable for the job of marking Henry Downey. As the platform for many Derry attacks, Downey needs to be watched closely and it would be strange if the opposition deputed their most prolific scorer to undertake the task.

Anyway, Houlahan isn't that sort of player and the narrow construction of his duties at centre forward led to Downey getting the only goal of the match last year. Better, perhaps, that Houlahan be placed at full forward but that could lead to an encounter with Gary Coleman who, if in one of his reputation busting humours, would be even scarier than Downey.

Move Houlahan to the corner and he might never see the ball, let alone play it and furthermore, with Tony Scullion to his left and Kieran McKeever to his right, Coleman - from Houlahan's perspective - begins to resemble a frying pan.

Armagh's other main attacking threat, Diarmuid Marsden, is picked in the corner but has generally posed greatest menace on the wing, as during the League run of two years ago.

A feature of the likely cockpit, between the 40s, is that three of the wing forwards are converted half backs. In the case of Derry's young Sean Lockhart, a preferred position can't be said to have been defined, but Armagh's captain Martin McQuillan has, with a few exceptions in this year's League, been nearly always associated with defence.

So too Johnny McGurk, who won an All Star for Derry's AllIreland winning season of 1993 at right wing back. The most plausible reason for this switch would appear to be the compelling form of Fergal McCusker and Karl Diamond at wing back, coupled with injuries to a variety of forwards.

Derry's strength on paper is also a reminder of the vast disparity between the reserve quality of the two counties. Armagh managers' Brian McAlinden and Brian Canavan have had a good look at what's available and decided they could make hardly any changes from last year.

The result shouldn't change much either.