I was up in Armagh last week at a function ahead of their game against Kildare. When you go to these things, you know everyone has to put on their best face. Even if fellas up there thought Armagh had no chance against Kildare, they weren’t going to be saying it to me. You keep hope alive as long as possible, especially at this time of year.
But even allowing for all that, I was struck by the level of conviction they had. You could see it was genuine. They weren’t just going to Croke Park with a set of rosary beads and a blessing from the priest.
They were looking at their team and sizing up what they had and the one thing they said with total belief was that if it was tight coming down the home stretch, they knew their players were good enough. For them, it was just a matter of seeing whether they could produce it.
In the end, they had nothing to worry about on that score. Of all the things you could be impressed about watching Armagh the other night, their attitude was what really stood out to me. They looked like a team that had full and total faith in what they were doing. You might say that every team still going at this time of year has that. But then you’d only have to watch Galway on Sunday to know it’s not the case.
Armagh and Kildare were more or less on the same level the last night. The difference was that Armagh reached out and grabbed a game that could have gone either way in the last 10 minutes. You look at someone like Ethan Rafferty who came off the bench and made a couple of horrendously silly fouls, including the one that gave Kildare a chance to draw level with 65 minutes on the clock.
I was watching him as Kevin Feely walked over to that free and he had his hands on his head, as if to say, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening to me.” He looked down and out, as if he was pitying himself for getting the team and himself into this position. He had come on as a sub shortly beforehand but even so, I was going: “How can this guy stay on the pitch? He’s going to cost them the game”.
Shows what I know.
Feely missed the free and Armagh stayed a point up. Their goalie took a short kick-out and lo and behold, who had his hand up in midfield looking for the out ball? Number 10, Ethan Rafferty, mad to get on the ball and make amends. He got on the pass, ran up along the right wing, took two solos and a hop. Then he turned inside onto his left foot and nailed the winning point.
And what a score. The ball must have hit the net behind the goal about 30 feet up. It wasn’t a hit and hope job – it was high, in a perfect arc over the black spot. One of those kicks that only happen when you are totally invested in it.
He wasn’t thinking about the mistakes he had made or the fact that he lost his place on the starting team for the game. He was just there, in the moment, going and winning the game. You’d nearly punch the air watching something like that.
You have to give huge credit to Kieran McGeeney. His players have obviously bought in hugely to what he’s been telling them. If you have that as a manager, it can cover a multitude of weaknesses. People shouldn’t assume that every manager gets the buy-in he needs. It’s not as commonplace as most people assume.
There was a time when a good way to judge buy-in amongst a county panel was to work out who was doing his gym work. If you got a gym regime laid out for you, the fellas who bought in were the fellas who did it, no questions asked.
If you had a majority of lads who half-did it or didn’t really bother, then you hadn’t the required buy-in. The team might still go places if it was good enough but to some extent, they would have been doing it for themselves. In spite of the manager rather than because of him.
Think about the modern footballer. The gym is non-negotiable now. In plenty of cases, it’s not even a chore for fellas. You look around a lot of the teams now and so many of the players look the same. Same builds, same shape. Big chests, square shoulders, all that. Nobody is stinting on the gym work.
The downside to all the gym work is that if everyone is doing it then it doesn’t really count as buying-in. It can make a player think he’s doing enough when really he’s only doing the bare minimum. You did five nights in the gym in the first week of January? Good for you. Do you think anyone did four?
So you have to ask yourself, what are they stinting on instead? And if you look around the various teams that tend to fall away around this stage of the championship, the thing that seems to be lacking is that sense of bloody-mindedness that was the hallmark of McGeeney the player. That ridiculous refusal to be admit defeat, the idea that even if you might lose you were never beaten.
Jamie Clarke was a case in point against Kildare. Jamie was a wanderer for years, as a player and as a person. You never got the sense from him that this game really had its claws in him. It was something he was good at, sure. But what was it beyond that? Maybe I'm being unfair to him but he never struck me as the kind of lad who would be sitting in a dressing room staring at the ground with his boots still on half an hour after losing a game.
But in his games this year, you can see he's coming with a different attitude. Not just on Saturday night – during the Down game in Ulster as well. He's orchestrating from the front, telling players back out the field where he wants the ball and where he wants them running. His score-getting, his balance, his trickery are all still top drawer but there's a real sense of responsibility in him now. That has to be down to McGeeney.
Years ago, after the great Kerry team started breaking up, a few of them wrote books. Pat Spillane wrote a book, my uncle Páidí wrote a book. I was talking to one of their former team-mates around that time and asked had he read them at all.
“I did,” he said, a bit disgruntled. “There was a lot of ‘I’ in them, I thought. ‘I’ did this and ‘I’ did that. I wonder will there ever be a book about what ‘we’ did?”
Anywhere McGeeney has gone, he has inspired a sense of ‘we’. He has developed that sort of loyalty and buy-in. It’s not loyalty to him, it’s loyalty to whatever mission he sets for them. Big difference. Everybody has played for a manager who demands loyalty to him but unless you’re buying what he’s selling, that sort of loyalty is pointless. Armagh might not have the squad that some of the remaining teams have but you won’t beat them for attitude.
Dublin and Kerry have that sort of buy-in, although their sights are obviously set higher. Jim Gavin and Eamonn Fitzmaurice have ravenous squads, even after all the games they've won. It's a bit different to Armagh in that nothing less than winning it all will do. But the level of obsession is a pre-requisite to even being there.
When you’re part of a squad that is expected to challenge for an All-Ireland, the buy-in is easier but the mental toll is harder. Knowing you’re good enough to be there or thereabouts is a blessing and a curse. I remember having years with Kerry where we’d be looking around the dressing room thinking it would be remiss of us not to be challenging in September. A dereliction of duty.
As a result, we came into training in those years with a sense of urgency. At a certain point in the summer, we looked around the rest of the championship field and saw nothing to scare us and it was as if September couldn’t come quickly enough. We had to be there. We had to collect an All-Ireland. Every waking minute and plenty of sleeping ones were taken up with it.
Since retiring, I’ve had people tell me that some of Kerry’s All-Irelands were soft enough. That we never had to beat very much to win them. They say this to me as if I’m supposed to hand the medal back or something. As if I give a rattling damn who we had to beat! If it was so easy-won, how come nobody else reached out and grabbed it?
In the Dublin dressing-room now – and the Kerry one to a lesser extent – those players know there's an All-Ireland there to be collected. Bernard Brogan knows his time is nearly up but he can see a fifth All-Ireland there for the taking. Kieran Donaghy is the same. This thing is coming to an end for both of them and they don't want it petering out. They're older now and the aches and pains last that bit longer but it doesn't matter. They're gathering as much in as they can while they can.
It’s all about attitude and buy-in. Gavin and Fitzmaurice have it. The best tribute you can pay McGeeney is that even without the realistic carrot of an All-Ireland dangling in front of his players, he has it too.
