Silence falls on proud Armagh's passing

Sideline Cut: Adieu, Armagh. A week after the last of Ulster has been booted out of the All-Ireland championship, the revisionism has started in earnest. Joe Kernan is back in Crossmaglen probably pondering his future over something mellow and drowsy from the wine cellar. Mickey Harte has one of the most mathematical and organised minds in the business of football management but even he must be reeling at the freakish percentage of injuries that continue to stalk Tyrone.

That apocalyptic afternoon when the All-Ireland champions succumbed to Laois already seems like a distant memory and although they battled out of habit through the gale and a hurt team suddenly possessed with Mick O'Dwyer's raging spirit, the Tyrone men seemed almost relieved when it was all over.

They had shipped too many blows in too brief a period. They walked away a proud but shattered team. And then last weekend Armagh were silenced by Kerry in startling fashion. Although the late scores Kerry piled on were essentially garbage-time scores, they also sent out a message. Declan O'Sullivan, dropped and the victim of terribly unfair treatment from a section of the Kerry support during the unconvincing Munster campaign, kicked a beauty, losing his marker with a clever solo on his right and then letting fly on the run with his left, giving the football a wonderfully sure arc.

Just after that Eamonn Fitzmaurice, deployed at centre forward for much of the league and rumoured to be unhappy (as if he would be delighted) at his failure to nail down a championship spot, reminded Croke Park of his versatility. Those scores sent out a message that Kerry, whatever the rows and recriminations, weren't about to sabotage their own summer.

Jack O'Connor's post-match observation that the odd flare-up and clout at training was harmless was greeted as some sort of biblical revelation. But in what has become an absurdly cautious era in Gaelic games, it was merely an honest and commonsense remark.

All great teams, in whatever sport, thrive on antagonistic training sessions. In sports featuring big teams, it is almost always the case that not all players will like one another. Fact is, they can all but hate one another and still create something harmonious and wonderful on a field.

What Kerry did against Armagh was remind the county of how fortunate they are to be able to produce a performance of such splendour with no prior notice. Tyrone did something similar last year against Dublin but there was something frightening about Kerry last Saturday. With their combination of audacious attacking, stylistic brilliance and hard, purposeful hitting came the realisation that you can never really beat Kerry, not in any lasting way.

Certainly, you can end their interest in the championship for a summer but you cannot inflict upon them the kind of defeat that will take them two, five or 10 years to recover from. Other counties spend a generation trying to build a promising team and the savage hurt of one single championship defeat can blow it all to smithereens. We believed Kerry were shaken to their core by that tornado showing by Tyrone in the All-Ireland semi-final of 2003 and yet they were champions again by the end of September in 2004.

An asterisk was painted beside that victory because it did not include a win over an Ulster county. The qualification must have incensed O'Connor and his team but they shut their mouths about it and kept them shut last September when they played second fiddle to Tyrone in a cracker of an All-Ireland final. Three weeks ago they were written off as cranky and aged. Now they have beaten Armagh, the county whose surprise victory in 2002 initiated the theory that northern teams were special. Kerry will deal with any adversity without being distracted from their instinctive accumulation of All-Ireland championships. They will always come back.

Can the same be said of Armagh? The belief here is no. The chief fascination of the Armagh team of 2000-2006 is they were plainly a once-in-a-lifetime sensation.

Kernan harnessed the great work done by Brian McAlinden and Brian Canavan and transformed a team many believed outdated into a machine loved and loathed by the public in equal measure. From 2002 to 2006, Armagh had football talent to burn, strong personalities, a mean streak and a delight in the strong, emphatic finish - a la Oisín McConville's delicate goal in the humiliation of Donegal in 2004 - always accompanied by a little sting of cruelty.

Armagh were simply the most interesting team out there and the belief here is between 2002 and 2004 they were closer to a three-in-a-row than they have been given credit for. Nine times out of 10, Stevie "from Killeavy" McDonnell would have buried that close-range chance that fell his way in the last minute of the 2003 All-Ireland final. Armagh were denied by an immortal defensive play by Conor Gormley.

A summer later, they were playing like untouchables, probably the best team in the country only to be taken out by Fermanagh in the greatest sting in Gaelic football.

For the past two years they have been brilliant in Ulster and gallant in the last stages of the All-Ireland. But Diarmuid Marsden went and was never really replaced. They have lost the smartness of Aidan O'Rourke in his prime. McConville is not quite the ghostly poacher of three years ago and the McEntee brothers have not been the force of old.

On the bright side, Paul McGrane and Kieran McGeeney had another formidable year and there are enough good young players to ensure Armagh remain a top-eight team. But it is a long wait until next year's championship and to have to do it all again from scratch, after five years of ferocious and mostly fruitless endeavour, is a mammoth task. It would be foolhardy to dismiss the possibility of a late burst for glory, but surely the light is dimming now.

Predictably, Ulster folk are standing tight and loyal. Seething though the rivalry across the troubled province, there was always a great collective pride in the way Armagh and Tyrone played with such fearlessness and - in the best sense - disrespect "down in Dublin".

Maybe the Ulster Years are over. Things fall apart. We will know for sure the sound of the funeral dirge when the Ulster Council come with cap in hand to the ramshackle, atmospheric streets of Clones looking to house the provincial football showdown just as they did in the old days, when the GAA establishment was happy to leave the northern counties and their three oddball southern cousins to their own devices apart from enjoying the odd chuckle at their half-savage ways.

Kerry, perpetually splendid, will probably have another bagful of championships by then and maybe Dublin will also begin to motor in the way they should. And all will be safe and civil again. But duller, too.