The last time that Armagh beat Donegal in the Championship, it actually heralded a new era for the team that was vanquished in Crossmaglen that day. Now it’s time they started one for themselves.
That fallout from that qualifier tie 12 years ago saw John Joe Doherty stepping down as manager and Jim McGuinness stepping in. A year later Donegal were Ulster champions. The following year they won the All-Ireland.
The 2-14 to 0-11 drubbing that they suffered that day was very much in keeping with the relationship between the counties over the previous decade and more. Granted, Donegal scored a one-point win in 2007 but it was due to a rather fortuitous late goal having struggled with the expectation that winning that year’s League brought for much of the afternoon.
“They had some sort of an inferiority complex against us back then and we always knew that once the pressure came on late on that we would have enough to get over them,” former Armagh star Aaron Kernan recalls. “There were days we beat them well.”
The 2010 game stood out though.
“They just took it so easy that day. On other days we might have been beating them but they would have stuck at it whereas that day they just took their beating. There was no resistance from them whatsoever.
“Mark McHugh was breaking on that day, Paddy McGrath, Murphy, while he’d been there for a few years, he was still very young. He wasn’t the leader that he developed into 12/24 months later. They had no experience, they had no winning experience really. To be fair, it wasn’t the greatest Armagh team in the world ever.
“Leaving Crossmaglen that day there’s not a chance you would have thought anyone coming in would have been able to do anything with that team, let alone what McGuinness turned them into.”
When Kernan made what proved to be his final appearance for Armagh against them in the 2014 All-Ireland quarter-final, a one-point defeat, Donegal were a very different animal.
“They were under pressure. We’d got a goal in the second half, Mickey Murray had kicked a super point to put us one up again when it looked like it was toing and froing but just across the field there was an air of composure and calmness about them.
“They all knew what they were about. They knew how to work scores. They got the scores easier than what we did and it was only a one-point win but they just didn’t look flustered or panicked on the field that day.”
Donegal are probably somewhere in between now. Not as flaky as they were in 2010 but certainly not as flinty as 2014 either having blown a number of winning positions in big games in recent years.
Kernan is somewhat uneasy about how Armagh chased down their suspensions in recent weeks but he’s unequivocal that the time for them to deliver in Ulster is now.
“They’re just coming to the stage, there’s a game where you just have to go and win it. It doesn’t matter where it is or who it’s against, it has to be won. This is the day.
“We flopped two years ago against Donegal. We left a world of work to do against Monaghan in the first half last year. The excuses, everything has to go.
“I don’t take suspensions or whoever’s injured, that’s the whole purpose of building a squad, this is the whole thing of having a backroom team like we have now, that boys are prepared and focused and ready to perform. Everything else is a sideshow.”
