Armagh still motivated by unfinished business

On Gaelic Games: The football season really got up and running at the weekend. We are now down to the top half of counties for this championship - eight qualifiers and eight provincial finalists. Armagh have captured the first silverware of the summer with a sixth Ulster title in eight years and a three-in-a-row, both achievements unequalled since the great Down team of the early 1960s.

Even allowing for the seething frustration within the county at having failed to add to their maiden All-Ireland four years ago, that provincial record is extraordinary. Current structures may diminish the relevance in All-Ireland terms of winning your province but Armagh's achievement stands as a track record of peerless consistency for early-season performance stretching back for nearly a decade.

That state of perennial competitiveness has to owe a great deal to Joe Kernan's management and the preparation methods that deliver such levels of concentration each year. The one reality new to intercounty football in the past five years since the advent of the qualifiers is that no team with All-Ireland aspirations can open their campaign in top gear and sustain it for four months, and so campaigns have to involve a graduated approach.

A clue to motivation was suggested by John O'Keeffe's preview, in this paper last Friday, of the Ulster final: "There's nothing like a narrow defeat in Croke Park to drive you on, which is one of the reasons it's so difficult for winners to repeat their success the following year."

You have to go back over eight years to a Clones defeat by Derry in June 1998 to record the last time Armagh's championship interest was ended outside Croke Park.

And of those six defeats only the 1999 All-Ireland semi-final loss to Meath was by more than a score, 2-5 to 0-15. The rest were divided between three points against Kerry in the 2000 All-Ireland semi-final replay and Tyrone in the 2003 All-Ireland final and three others by the narrowest of margins to Galway, Fermanagh and Tyrone.

That's a lot of coming close on the big stage. How for instance could Armagh - for all the reservations about an advancing age-profile - not have felt they had more to offer last year after failing by the thickness of a bus ticket to a Tyrone team that won the All-Ireland with more to spare than the three points against Kerry indicated?

Which brings us to an interesting variation on O'Keeffe's theme, because the one county with a comparable history of losing out in Croke Park over the past 10 years is Kerry, whose seven championship exits include six at headquarters but by an average margin of over five points.

Confirmation at the weekend that Kerry struggle to get to the pace of high-tempo matches shone some light on the county's difficulties with the system. Art McRory, the godfather of Tyrone football, pointed out before last year's All-Ireland that he wasn't convinced by Kerry simply because over the first two seasons of Jack O'Connor's management they had experienced so little of the intensity Tyrone had encountered in three Croke Park matches with Armagh and two with Dublin.

The moribund state of the Munster championship and some handy draws had accounted for that. The implication might be unfair in that Tyrone and Armagh hadn't the legs for the 2004 All-Ireland and Kerry timed their preparations brilliantly to peak in September. But Art was right about their readiness for last year's final.

There are questions to be answered after last Sunday's drawn Munster final. Perhaps Kerry are timing their run like two years ago, when they also drew the provincial decider, but with the All-Ireland stages just weeks away they need to move up the gears next weekend just as Armagh did three days ago after dragging their heels through Ulster.

Cork looked to have learned more than Kerry from the relentless, pressing game that took Tyrone to last year's All-Ireland, and they gave a consistent performance that just strayed from the plans for the critical minutes before half-time, when they were in shock at Anthony Lynch's sending off.

Billy Morgan was happy to administer another jolt to Kerry just eight days before the 40th anniversary of his first senior intercounty joust with the Kingdom, which ended in victory - a fair reflection of a career that but for the coincidence of Mick O'Dwyer's great team would actually be well in profit in its dealings with the neighbours.

He will be wary of the fact that his team looked much improved 12 months ago on the basis of its Munster final and All-Ireland quarter-final displays only to fall apart one match later - ironically and excruciatingly against Kerry.

If there is a tilt in football's centre of gravity this year the past weekend might well be seen as the fulcrum. Two Leinster teams defeated Ulster opposition - an occurrence as rare as hens' teeth in the qualifiers era - including Laois's defeat of the All-Ireland champions.

It wouldn't do to get too carried away with beating a Tyrone team that had lost critical mass with serial injuries, but at the very least Laois now have a more palatable point of reference for the championship ahead than the drubbing at Dublin's hands.

Mick O'Dwyer has scarcely looked more agitated during a match since his second coming in Leinster began nearly 16 years ago. His demeanour afterwards was also one of vibrant irritation, ignoring reporters, whom he can usually plamás with ease - uncharacteristic behaviour for someone who generally doesn't care about media.

There was of course a subplot in the narrative. Back in the autumn when requested by players to - ummm - modernise his approach a little, O'Dwyer agreed to appoint specialist coaches. Physical trainer Gerry Loftus, Bomber Liston as forwards coach and backs coach Jimmy Deenihan were among those brought in to expand the backroom team.

When the championship ended in catastrophe, O'Dwyer, with the air of a virtuoso tearing the violin from a recalcitrant student, ordered the players in and decided to go hands-on again in training. The sharp shock of some old-school routines helped players expiate their Croke Park shame.

Not all of the new assistants are entirely happy with this state of affairs, but Micko's convictions are one bastion of tradition that survived a radical weekend still intact.