One of the age-old challenges of the All-Ireland club championships has been navigating the Christmas period, an intense holiday mood settling unhelpfully between winning a provincial title and reassembling for the All-Ireland stages.
For Aidan Nugent and St Patrick’s, Cullyhanna, there doesn’t appear to have been too much of a challenge or potential distraction.
“We didn’t stray away from what we’d usually do. Someone said Christmas comes around every year whereas All Ireland semi-finals don’t and that puts it into perspective that there’s something greater hanging in front of [you] than a night out around Boxing Day or a few drinks on Christmas.
“We just prepared the same way. We had a schedule and the way Christmas fell, it didn’t really disrupt us. We still trained our Tuesday and Thursday and got our gym session done so it didn’t really affect us.”
The Armagh intermediate champions duly cleared the hurdle set by Kildare’s Allenwood together with their evergreen former All Star, Johnny Doyle, still going at 45. This weekend they become the first Armagh club to contest this final when they face Cork’s Cill na Martra.
Nugent, who was joint captain of Armagh last year but whose intercounty season was undermined by injury, says Cullyhanna have been able to deal with the contrasts in style that the club championship throws up, from the high-scoring march through Armagh and the more dogged demands of the provincial championship.
“I don’t think there have been too many hammerings in Ulster football, senior, intermediate or junior, so we knew it was going to be one-point games. We were ready for those sort of different scenarios, tighter spaces and tighter pitches and being marked a lot tighter.
“I think Allenwood allowed us a wee bit more space, which might have made it a better game to watch from a neutral perspective,” he says of the All-Ireland semi-final.
He understands that Sunday can’t really be chalked up to experience.
“Yeah, the thing that sticks out when we were back in the under-21s is that we had won four under-21s out of five and [the mentors] were saying ‘these days don’t come about too often’.
“We just thought ‘what are they on about? This seems very simple’. We were 17, 18, 19, 20 and it turned out it was not that simple and we need to take that advice and take it [the opportunity] when it comes.”
