Armagh and Monaghan rivalry a competitive affair devoid of emnity

It’s 20 years since Joe Kernan stood on the pitch in Clones and sang a lament for the lack of spite between Armagh and Monaghan. His All-Ireland champions had just begun their defence of Sam Maguire by falling to a 0-13 to 0-9 ambush. In the manhunt that followed, Kernan made sure to point the searchlight at what he saw as an abundance of civility on the part of his players.

“Our lads are hurting in the dressing room there now and I’m glad they are because we didn’t perform out there,” Kernan said. “Ah, you talk about the bit of hatred and the bit of revenge — we just didn’t have it. Monaghan and ourselves are good rivals and that is it. I would hope if the two teams meet again, we’d have a bit more bite.”

[ Champions crash at first hurdle ]

As it happened, when they met again the following year, Armagh did come out windmilling from the opening bell, resulting in a 15-point beatdown. But the bit of hatred Joe was looking for? It’s not really a thing between these two. They’ve played 10 times in the championship over the past two decades — five wins for Monaghan, three for Armagh and two draws. There’s no big bone to pick out of any of them.

Armagh and Monaghan share a border that runs for some 40 miles, from Tynan to Culloville on the Armagh side and Glaslough to Inniskeen on the Monaghan side. Both counties have their blood feuds around and about the place —Armagh with Tyrone and Down, Monaghan with Cavan and Tyrone. So it’s not like they don’t have it in them.

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But when it comes to one another, they’re like a pair of boxers who make a show of giving each other death stares at the weigh-in before sharing a cab back to the hotel. The games tend to be sauced every bit as intensely as any others in Ulster but the flavour is rarely bitter.

“I found that when I was over Inniskeen,” says Oisín McConville. “I was only there a short while before I had this realisation that I was basically in a place that was an extension of where I was from. That’s what it felt like. And it makes sense, obviously. Crossmaglen is only seven miles away.”

Sure. But plenty of villages are only a few miles across the border between plenty of counties and you may as well be crossing into another dimension as you go from one to the other. For whatever reason, there’s no big whoop about it between Armagh and Monaghan. All along their border, lives intermingle and football finds its place.

Karl O’Connell is from Tyholland, a village so close to the Armagh border that the locals’ phones occasionally switch themselves to the UK network without warning. Armagh captain Rory Grugan teaches in St Macartan’s College in Monaghan town, sharing a staff room up until recent years with Monaghan attacker Jack McCarron. Armagh wing forward Jason Duffy is a grandson of legendary Monaghan crooner Big Tom; can’t get more tangled up than that.

“I have loads of family in Armagh,” says former Monaghan defender Dessie Mone, whose mother is from Ballymacnab. “That rivalry is there and I supposed it is a bit deeper for me because I have relations down there and I spent plenty of my childhood there. I’d be making sure there was no Armagh flag in the front garden, that’s for sure.

“And when it came to playing against them, I think we always felt that they were reachable. If we could get up to their level, then we’d move into that upper echelon of teams that got to compete in Croke Park. After they won the All-Ireland in 2002, everyone in Monaghan was going, ‘Can that not be us?’”

Aaron Kernan was 19 when Armagh won that All-Ireland, ready to be the next generation to carry on that team’s legacy. But that was all big talk, for down the road. At the time, he was just enmeshed in the thing — a supporter, the son of the manager, an eye-witness at the epicentre of everything that happened.

“The celebrations in Cross on the Monday night, one thing I always remember is that a good few Monaghan intercounty players came up to join in the party. They weren’t heading up the road to Omagh the following year, you can be damn sure of that!

“There has always just been that thing there — we would have gone out in Blayney when I was growing up. Loads of Armagh people would have had their weddings in Monaghan. Loads of them would work in Blayney or Carrick or Monaghan. So just in the way that life goes, everybody would know everybody. There was never any real bad blood in the football as a result.”

McConville worked in Monaghan town for a few years and has been over plenty of players from his neighbouring county in his time. Not alone did he manage Inniskeen, he has had several waves of Monaghan players through his hands at Dundalk IT. In different circumstances, all that weaving through each other’s lives could have left the relationship knotted and sticky. McConville has never seen it that way.

“I’ve always found that both counties think largely the same about who they are in relation to everyone else,” he says. “We’re not the mightiest two counties in the game. There’s a bit of us-against-the-world in the mentality of both places. Both sets of supporters like to see a team that keeps punching right to the end. There’s a bit of Scrappy Doo to both of us.

“Even this week, all the conversations that you’d have around the place are a wee bit different than if we were playing Tyrone or Down or even Donegal. If it was one of those, you’d be fronting it out, slagging them, trying to get a bit of needle going. But this is a real ‘youse’ll-probably-beat-us’ game. Nobody means it obviously but people on both sides are saying it to each other all week.”

Thrown into the mix this weekend is the fact that both sides have an atrocious record in All-Ireland quarter-finals. When Armagh finally fell to Tyrone in their monumental semi-final in 2005, you would have had a hard time convincing anyone that we’d be sitting here 18 years later and the county still wouldn’t have made it back to the last four of the championship. They’ve been in five All-Ireland quarter-finals since then and won none of them, sharing with Cork the longest current streak since their last win in the last eight.

Monaghan’s record is arguably even worse. They’ve never won a straight knock-out game at this stage of the championship — in six games they’ve lost to Tyrone three times, Dublin twice and Kerry once. They made it through the Super-8s in 2018 by beating Galway and Kildare but when it comes to one-off, do-or-die, they’ve invariably died rather than done.

“That’s going to add the real edge to it,” McConville says. “Everybody from both counties knows how bad they’ve been at this stage of the championship. They both know this is where they tend to fall down. And they both know it’s where the other team tends to fall down too.”

Between these two, nothing is unknown.