Gaelic Games: In a way there was symmetry to yesterday's club football semi-final before around 8,000 at Parnell Park. Crossmaglen's great sweep of three All-Ireland titles in four years could be said to have started in earnest eight years ago in Portlaoise when they clipped reigning champions Laune Rangers by a point.

This time the great Armagh club were themselves touched off by a hungry young side from Portlaoise, who are now one match away from winning the club's second All-Ireland and first for 22 years.

The parallels weren't lost on Cross full forward Cathal Short, who'd been through it all since 1997.

"We didn't underestimate them," he said. "We knew they were a quality side and we were up against it. They're a young team, probably what we were seven or eight years ago - coming straight through from underage and all credit to them. I hope they go on to win it in the final."

Portlaoise coach Tommy Conroy will be concentrating on bringing about that outcome next month. His reaction to the narrowest of wins was one long exhalation of relief.

"Relieved and thrilled and delighted and tired - you name it, everything," he said. "I suppose the big thing from our point of view was that in Laois and Leinster we'd won matches from the front, apart from Kilmacud when we were four or five down.

"That win against a team and a club the calibre of Crossmaglen has done us the power of good."

When your luck's out, it's out. Joe Kernan, now manager of Armagh and who took Crossmaglen to those three summits, was stoic about a match that had seen son Stephen sent off and one of his county side, Tony McEntee, stretchered off and taken to hospital for a scan of a possibly fractured ankle and his club's most gilded generation perhaps sailing into the sunset.

"This makes you value what you've won all the more," he said.

In the other semi-final, Ballina won a poor game at the expense of Kilmurry-Ibrickane.

In the second half, the Mayo champions got locked into a bruising and scoreless 20-minute period that threatened to play havoc on their All-Ireland chances.

But Kilmurry lost two players in quick succession and Ballina had enough poise to fashion the scores that decided the game in the final minutes, with Patrick Harte hitting three fine points from play to guide his team home. They were, remarkably, his team's only points of the half.

"We were lucky in a sense that we went in at half-time ahead," said Ger Brady, the television man of the match. "We didn't play that well at all and we are just delighted with the result. Kilmurry really put us under pressure even when they went down a couple of men. We have a lot of work to do if we are to compete with Portlaoise."

It was a bittersweet end to Kilmurry's historic season. It was the type of hard and sometimes aimless match that always suits the underdogs and had they managed to maintain the type of concentration that so impressed earlier in the year, they might have gone on to Croke Park.

"Look, we needed to have 15 on the field to win that game and even if we had, you can't say we would win it," admitted manager Pat O'Dwyer.

"There is one thing containing a team and another putting them away. We missed our scoring chances, but I must commend our players for their wonderful courage. They did not die and I admire them hugely for that. I would love to have won it, naturally, but I am glad we went out the way we did."