I was away in Spain for a few days and watched the hurling final over there. Incredible stuff. After what we all saw, I nearly can’t believe we’re talking about football this week. A game like that should be savoured like good wine. We should be taking our time about it and reliving it for days, talking about every last bit of it until the cows come home.
But no, we’re on to the football final straight away. I opened up some of the papers yesterday and saw interviews with Rory Grugan of Armagh and Rob Finnerty of Galway. And no offence to the two lads but I was going, “Ah come on, are we done with the hurling already?”
Rush, rush, rush. Quick, get it all done and out of the way before Coldplay get here. When the two finals come within a week of each other, you’re basically telling everyone that they’re just another game in the diary. That’s the last thing an All-Ireland final should be, no matter whether it’s hurling or football.
I’m excited for Galway v Armagh. Both teams know each other and what they’re capable of. More to the point, both teams know themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a grind because both teams are well fit to handle a grind. I can’t see either of them winning by five or losing by five. It will be close, meaning that small things will become very important.
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I presume a lot of them watched the hurling on Sunday. Even if they had no interest in the game, they’d have been mad to miss it. An All-Ireland football final is one of the only games in your life where you get to watch a full dress rehearsal a week beforehand. You get to see what effect the crowd has, you get your head around how the time can drag beforehand and what the preliminaries are like.
Most of all, you get to see how the pitch is playing. Plenty of Cork and Clare players slipped on Sunday — whereabouts on the pitch did it happen? What kind of moves were they making when it did? These are the sort of things you only find out by watching a full-intensity game at a hundred miles an hour. You can spend the whole of the warm-up testing the pitch and still be surprised by how different the conditions feel underfoot when the game gets going.
Galway and Armagh come into this final with a lot of boxes ticked. Both have a serious physical presence and you could see it in the parade when Armagh played Kerry, their lads were bigger and stronger than ours. That matters. But Galway have plenty for fire to fight fire on that score — their half-forward line of Matthew Tierney, John Maher and Cillian McDaid won’t be taking a backward step for anybody.
They also have a good road behind them. They’ve both had times in the season where people looking on from the outside were saying it looked like the wheels were coming off. Galway struggled past Sligo and should have been beaten by Mayo. Armagh lost a league final and an Ulster final, even though they had the winning of both games.
So now you have two teams coming to a final knowing that they’ve been stress-tested along the way. They have the confidence of coming through it all. When they have their last team meeting on Saturday night, neither squad is going to have any doubts that they can win an All-Ireland the next day. They know this is there for them.
On that score, I think losing a final two years ago gives Galway a slight advantage. Armagh can say they’ve had plenty of heartbreak, losing all those penalty shoot-outs and so on. But those were in Ulster finals and All-Ireland quarter-finals. They would have felt brutal at the time but nothing eats at you like losing an All-Ireland final.
I didn’t have many regrets in my career but the one that always stayed with me was losing the All-Ireland club final in 2004 with An Ghaeltacht. Leaving Croke Park that day after Caltra beat us, I could already feel the hurt of it was going to stay with us for a long, long time. You know in your bones that you’re starting the following year back at square one and that it’s such a long road back.
You could see that regret in Jim McGuinness after Donegal lost the semi-final to Galway. McGuinness has been around the block. He knows you don’t get a ticket to the final out of a cornflakes box. As well as that, he knows that once you’re there, anything can happen. It takes on a life of its own. Anyone can catch fire.
Galway are well aware of what a final takes. They didn’t just play in a final two years ago, they played well in it. They took everything Kerry had to throw at them and were still level with four minutes left on the clock. Shane Walsh had the game of his life. Cillian McDaid wasn’t far behind.
They have the same management and more or less the same squad coming back to the final again, whereas Armagh haven’t been here for 19 years. I would expect that to make some bit of a difference.
Now, at the same time, Kieran McGeeney has the perfect answer for that. When the Armagh team he captained came to play us in 2002, none of them had ever been in an All-Ireland final. Armagh had never won Sam Maguire. It didn’t affect them one bit. He’s the last man likely to let his players use inexperience as an excuse.
Armagh have been a serious team for a while now and they have players in great form. Rian O’Neill was exceptional against Kerry and if he can turn up again on Sunday playing like that, they have nothing to fear. They can be All-Ireland champions, no question.
But my instinct is to go with Galway. Pádraic Joyce has managed his panel so well across the season. They are here now. Nobody is saving a bit for the next day. There’s no sense of seeing if you can get 45 minutes out of Walsh or Damien Comer or Seán Kelly and hoping for the best. It’s all duck or no dinner now and I’d imagine all Joyce has wanted since the start of 2024 is to get his team to the start line of a final and unleash them.
Galway won’t win it by much. But I think they’ll get over the line.
