Keith Duggan explores the unique chemistry that has made Ulster football so vivid and volatile

The cry rang clear and triumphant through the din: "Bring on the Bogside." This was about seven o'clock in the evening and the old-fashioned market town of Clones was the theatre for one of those heedless chapters of Ulster football that reeked of petroleum.

In front of a national television audience, the Ulster first-round replay between Donegal and Armagh, potentially two of the most attractive football teams in the country, had crossed over into wilful recklessness and guerrilla exchanges. Donegal's summer had combusted, Armagh men were supine across the field, and after the last incendiary exchange Armagh's stoical full back Francie Bellew was among those sent to the line in disgrace.

As it transpired, Bellew was an innocent cast to the gallows, but as he departed the field, he was ushered toward the dugout by rapturous applause, his duty all done.

And then the Northern voice rang musically through the tumult of Armagh joy.

"Bring on the Bogside," a man cried out to the sullen skies, anticipating the next day out against Derry. "Bring on the Bogside."

After everything that had occurred, after a tea-time game that left both managers ashen faced and scandalised observers down South, the euphoria and defiance seemed to say it all. Ulster football was weird. In Ulster, enough was never enough.

Tomorrow, Armagh and Tyrone, the undisputed superpowers of the new Ulster product, will fill Croke Park for the provincial showdown. It promises to be epic: 80,000 spectators and arguably the make-or-break contest for the brightest lights in the Northern sky. Love or hate what can be broadly referred to as the Northern game, it is undeniable that Ulster has never had it so good.

It's all a far cry from the decades when the Ulster football championship was widely perceived as an impenetrable faction fight from which the lone survivor would, as Derry football man Gerry Donnelly puts it "be sent down to Dublin for a tanking".

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Ulster game was regarded as at best unfashionable and at worst barbaric. The majestic confidence Down had demonstrated in the 1960s seemed like an aberration as a succession of Ulster champions, drained by the internecine battles and secretly wanting for confidence, failed to make an impression on the national scene.

IT HAD its sweet moments - Frank McGuigan's beautiful haul of points for Tyrone in July of 1984, Monaghan's insolent run against mighty Kerry a year later - but, in general, Ulster football was deemed an oddity.

Ulster football was about intricate hand-passing, constant bickering, reckless challenges, unknowable local rivalries and a propensity for blowing its top. Ulster was the angry province, full of players and managers and supporters who constantly looked like they'd had their last pint swiped at closing time.

Jack O'Shea could never have played in Ulster for the simple reason that he smiled too much. Although the unprecedented trinity of All-Ireland wins by Down, Donegal and Derry between 1991 and 1994 gave the province a strong foundation, as the years passed those seasons were remembered as fireworks going off in a disused factory.

By 2000, the emphasis has shifted firmly back toward the South. As recently as 1998, the great Tyrone football man Art McRory was lamenting "the moments of madness" that seemed to afflict the game in his native county, and at that time it was hard to identify an Ulster team of any great distinction.

Yet, within five years, Ulster had set the tone to such a degree that the province and its style of football came to be regarded with a mixture of envy and trepidation, admiration and outright suspicion. Accusations levelled about Ulster teams "ruining the game" have since become commonplace. Ulster shrugs.

"I think the general Ulster style would be interpreted in terms of the short hand-pass, strong defensive systems and very intense games," says Eugene Young, the high-performance director in the province.

"But I think what has also happened is that in guys like Mickey Harte and Joe Kernan you have very strong tacticians. People complain about the defensive systems they use, but I think that is self-defeating; it is insinuating that the game can't absorb these systems. The quickest way to end a defensive system is to work out a way of beating it. And there are ways."

Young, based in Jordanstown, was appointed in 2000 through an Ulster Council/Lottery liaison. A former Derry footballer, he also represented Ireland at basketball and has immersed himself in sports theory and psychology.

This week, he was supervising an elite football and hurling camp featuring 90 kids from around the province. As well as receiving coaching from the top players in the game, the youngsters would undergo urine testing and heart monitoring and analysis - all designed to prepare them for graduation to the senior grade a few years down the line.

Young also liaises with county development officers and the vision is that what is preached at the top will eventually be replicated in all the clubs. But the intention is not to hammer home some preconceived notion of an "Ulster" philosophy. In fact, the chief emphasis on his summer camps is the long ball.

"If you have forwards like Paddy Bradley or Steven McDonnell, you are hindering yourself by not getting the ball into them directly," he reasons. "That is what we are trying to coach at the moment."

Young does have some sympathy for those who bemoan the defensive and overtly physical manifestations of the Ulster game, but only to a point.

"Some of the defence is just basic common sense. For instance, if a guy is attacking a team along the right wing, then we would encourage the left wing back to drop into the centre between the ball and the opposite corner to cut off a crossfield pass.

"It is just a sagging defence. Or if there are certain positions you are slightly weak in, you devise a system to compensate with other players.

"To be honest, my belief is that some teams are too rigid in their game plans. I can't understand why teams don't come into each game with at least three specific game plans.

"As for the negative aspects of the game, I think the biggest problem is this thing of five or six players ganging around the player with the ball. It looks unsightly and you have the situation where the player on the ball is both unprotected and technically in breach of the rules. Maybe it is time to just reduce the tackle to two players challenging whoever is on the ball."

Back when Young played for Derry in the early 1980s, Ulster football was a different animal. There was none of today's technical sophistication, only the treacherous honour of hard-earned local stripes. He recalled defeating Cork in Ballinascreen and Kerry in a challenge game in 1985 and just as he and his Derry team-mates began to fancy themselves, Monaghan dumped them from the championship.

A week later, the Derry board expelled the joint management team, including Mickey Moran and Peter Stevenson, and the county took a long time to recover.

But volatility and instability were never far from the front line in Ulster. Even after the 1991-1994 successes, scenes like those in Fintona in 1996 between Carrickmore and Errigal Ciarán, when teams and officials battered into one another, facilitated the perception of Ulster GAA country as a half-wild place.

Two years later, Peter Canavan, the emblem for all of Tyrone, was unable to play in the first round of the championship after having his jaw broken in another shocking breakdown of civility against Dungannon Clarkes.

WITH SUCH pitch battles raging internally, how could Ulster teams ever hope to mount a cohesive championship campaign on the national scene?

Those self-inflicted wounds provoked Art McRory's despairing words. But all that has changed. The club scene might still be fierce, but it is no longer detrimental, certainly not to the counties that will feature tomorrow.

Séamus Mallon, who has boyhood memories of Armagh's All-Ireland final in 1953, went on to play for the county and will be in Croke Park tomorrow to follow Joe Kernan's phenomenal team.

"They are one of the strongest teams I have ever seen anyway. They are so well organised and fast and accurate. But, unfortunately, their physical command of a field is such that I think it has hidden their skills. And there is an enormous range of skills on this team. When Armagh put their mind to it, they flow."

As Mallon's commitment to the SDLP deepened and the political situation in the Six Counties became more charged, he rarely had Sundays free to attend games, but he was moved by the importance the GAA took on for Nationalists during the bleakest years of atrocity.

"It was like a comfort zone for people, somewhere they felt safe, and GAA clubs and meeting at games gave them a focal point."

Of course, the very fact of being a GAA member in parts of Ulster could carry the gravest of consequences. From July 1972, when a UDA/UFF squad murdered Frank Corr, secretary of the south Antrim GAA Board, supporting the association became much more than just a pastime or passion.

On the night of August 24th, 1975, Colm McCartney from Bellaghy, and John Farmer from Moy in Tyrone, drove home from the All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Derry through Armagh. A UVF squad in uniform stopped their car and shot both men.

In Tyrone, they play an annual tournament in honour of Jim Devlin, the former county man killed with his wife, Gertrude, in May of 1974 on his way to buy some chips.

Travelling to and from football games during the bad years, being seen at the wrong place by the wrong people, getting exposed: it just meant there was always a chance. That is one of the reasons why every breath on Ulster fields seemed so grimly contested.

"There was and remains an intensity about Ulster football," acknowledges Mallon, "that probably reflects the intensity of the circumstances under which people lived. And that common experience has probably given Ulster football its raw nerve or the rough edge that people sometimes comment on."

The killings no longer, mercifully, dominate life in the Six Counties and Mallon contends that the renewed confidence of the Ulster game "mirrors the changes that have occurred and the confidence that goes with that".

He believes that, in time, Ulster GAA will extend beyond the borders of the Nationalist communities and looks forward to seeing that day but holds that "the intensity will never diminish".

And how could it? As the Derry writer Eamon McCann says: "What is the GAA only guys in uniform going out to do battle in honour of the parish?"

"In the North," he added, "there was the added resonance of politics. And maybe sometimes the intensity of the club football - and those rivalries actually hindered the development of county teams."

And that lies at the heart of it. In the truly lost days, trying to unify Ulster football seemed as hopeless as trying to repair a windowpane shattered by a brick. Over the last five years, there has been a fundamental shift, a sense that all those disparate energies have at last been channelled into a central engine.

"Critics of the Ulster game," muses Gerry Donnelly of the Derry County Board, "are waiting for it to roll over and die. But I am not sure that is going to happen."

IT IS HARD to imagine, particularly now that the Ulster final is deemed too grand and big a production for the winding streets of Clones.

But this is surely just a phase; Clones exercises the same spiritual pull on Ulster football people as Thurles does on hurling folk. The crowd outside the Creighton, the thumping music from the burger vans and the Big Hill: there is a feel about a big Ulster game in Clones that is incomparable.

It is true Ulster days are concocted of different and perhaps darker materials than those of its sister provinces, but perhaps they are all the richer for that. They certainly inspire more original responses.

As Kevin McStay, the colourful RTÉ analyst, was moved to remark during one of the lustier exchanges during that macabre encounter between Armagh and Donegal, "Huh. Welcome to the Pleasure Dome."

Indeed.