GAA / Armagh 2-10 Donegal 1-09: And so we move through the back door into a world of distorted scale and quirky values.

The All-Ireland final, once a big embracing national celebration of sorts, shall this year be a neighbourly skirmish, a blood feud, a private row. Armagh and Tyrone will play for the Cup, the holiday and the bragging rights. The rest of us will watch.

Armagh prised Donegal out of the championship with some difficulty yesterday and immediately locked stares with the people across the backyard fence. Their business with each other has a rare history and boiling passion to it. The final may come mauling and kicking through the tripwires of our effete sensibilities, it may be the ugliest thing since, well since Tyrone ’s  semi-final, but they ’ll not care. This one is in the family. Different rules.

To be fair to Ulster football (in the hope that perhaps it will reciprocate and be fair to us) yesterday ’s semi-final gave us southern softies some hope that watching the final might not necessarily involve the involuntary issuing of the squeamish noises that vegetarians might make while touring an abattoir.

Donegal and Armagh weren't pretty but
they were pretty exciting. The result was in doubt right until the end and had the affair been run by the International Wrestling Federation, we 'd have rolled our eyes at the lengths everyone went just to keep the drama going.

Armagh kindly ran in 21 wides, always teasing us with the possibility that they might in the end suffer for their wastefulness. Donegal played up their romantic underdog status by having their full back sent off and by bouncing again and again off their burly opponents. So urgent was the state of affairs between the teams after Christy Toye slipped a goal home on 34 minutes that Armagh took just the regulation half-time break.

Toye’s goal was perhaps the high point of the game. Armagh had been holding Donegal against their will at one end of the field for some time and seemed intent on demonstrating to them just how many different ways there are to hit a wide. Then with one bound Donegal were free. They surged down the field playing a series of the short passes for which the county is famous.

Toye was there at the end. A great roar shook the sky. Diarmuid Marsden popped a point over for Armagh just before the half-time break to close the gap to three points, but one couldn’t help but wonder about the romance being offered by Donegal, a team roughed up, beaten and relegated in the league, a side who were using up coaches like other people use kleenex, a team which had no stamina work down by the time the evenings lengthened, an outfit who even by the dramatic standards of the backdoor system had effected a change in their performance level that it usually takes a generation to make.

Armagh aren ’t the sort to get dewy-eyed about other northern sides, though. They strung their sturdy defences up and went about winning the match aware of the fact that their profligacy was turning them into a schoolchild ’s maths problems. If a team has 11 wides in 35 minutes, that is in the time it takes them to score four points, how many wides must that team kick if they are to score enough to beat a team who are four points ahead of them through an Adrian Sweeney point early in the second half? Early in the second half the equation changed.

Armagh,as large and imposing as a wall without actually physically being a wall, were there for Donegal to crash into. Most of the day that ’s just what happened. Armagh resisted stoutly, Donegal drove at them. The flashpoint came at an unlikely source. Ray Sweeney, the Donegal full back, went a little extra curricular in his attempts to stop Marsden. Second yellow. Goodbye.

Armagh used the loose man in customary fashion. Tony McEntee had dropped to the half-back line anyway, freeing up Kieran McGeeney as normal. Now Donegal could only offer token resistance to the ploy. The next quarter was probably as fine a tribute to Brian McEniff ’s management as Donegal have provided in recent times. With tiredness nibbling at them,and with the excuse of Sweeney ’s red card to comfort them, they would have been slightly justified in folding. Instead, Donegal went about looking for the win.

Armagh had two scores. Donegal just took two back. It took until the 20th minute of the second half for the dam to crack.A long ball came floating in. Niall McCready and Steven McDonnell gathered underneath it. McCready needed to make a break but didn’t. McDonnell got his hands on it and did what he has always done best: scored. His goal gave Armagh a parity which they enjoyed for just four minutes till Oisin McConville came back down and hit a point.

By now the game was hurtling towards the finish and Donegal were going with it, clinging to the wheel confident at last that if Brian McEniff said they could win well then so they could. The loss of the man was expensive in terms of stamina but the manner in which teams play can sometimes negate that. Donegal can run the ball and feel comfortable while doing it and they can speed a car along country roads. Their unique style is for Donegal people as good an emblem for their own sense of difference.

Finally, as the orchestra was getting ready for the final movement, Armagh found a goal when Paddy McKeever was felled inside the large square as he was about to score a decent goal with Armagh just a point ahead. He scored it anyway but a penalty had been given. The clock ticked away. McConville, whose wide tally for the day probably constituted a personal record, looked long and hard at the ball and then stuck it in the corner.The last blow was mortal.

"That was a a struggle without a shadow of doubt," said Armagh manager Joe Kernan afterwards." I don ’t know how you boys seen it but ..."and he paused and looked around. "Fuck me! I wouldn’t mind but we’ve been working on shooting." And his great face cracks into a huge grin. Semi-finals are for the winning. This year ’s are done. Clear the decks.