The Final Countdown

I don’t know about you, but I’m actually rather looking forward to the much-dreaded football final between Armagh and Tyrone on September 28.

Some of this, of course, is just simple anticipation of the kind that would precede any All-Ireland showdown.
Some of it is a desire to see whether Tyrone will finally hold their nerve and claim that elusive first ever Sam Maguire title, or whether they will again die roaring as they did against Kerry in 1986, when they adroitly managed to turn a seven-point lead into an eight-point deficit in 15 minutes, throwing in Kevin McCabe’s missed penalty for good measure.
And some of it is based on a fairly safe assumption, that the final cannot possibly be as bad as the semi-final which preceded it the other week — the utter atrocity that was Tyrone 0-13, Kerry 0-6.
Fuck me, it was dire. Do you know how many frees were conceded in that wretched excuse for a match? Think of a number, then double it. Then add on a bit more. There were, in fact, 72 frees whistled up, one a minute. The hapless referee must have had chapped lips and lockjaw by the end.
The writing of Kerry’s obituary — and it would most definitely be an obituary, given that this is the third consecutive year they have blown up in Croke Park — would require another column in itself. However, one hack made a telling point when he observed that their ability to substitute four of their starting six forwards without altering the standard of the attack was in fact a fallibility, not a strength.
What is beyond doubt is that this was probably as bad as the championship gets. What we were expecting was the game of the summer — skill to burn, end-to-end action and goals galore. What we got was a typical Ulster championship match in which one of the teams just happened to have turned up wearing Kerry jerseys — congested midfield, dogged defence, few scores, an ugly war of attrition.
Tyrone-Kerry was so poor, so dispiriting, that the week after, watching the Armagh-Donegal match was like quaffing vintage champagne after being force-fed cans of cheap lager — an infinitely better game, though still not one likely to be given a late-night airing on TG4 in twenty years’ time, I’ll grant you.
The fact that the final is being contested by two teams from Ulster, a province whose name is a byword for dour, fiercely-contested, low-scoring struggles (and that’s just the Assembly elections), has meant that most people’s attitude is now somewhere between distaste and apathy.
Several people of my acquaintance say they won’t even bother to watch it. Which is a shame, because it actually has all the potential ingredients to be a classic, especially as advance expectations are so low.
Both teams like to mix it, of course. Especially Armagh, who were up to their old tricks against Donegal, pulling the same rough-house nonsense they produced against Dublin. They even got away with it for the most part, thanks to their ingenious deployment of the old facial-elbow-in-front-of-the-referee trick, an offence which is almost too obvious to be sent off for.
As it happens, I think Tyrone will win it, though by saying that, I’ve probably just shaved ten per cent off their chances. They are, in general, slightly better footballers than Armagh, and in beating Kerry, they reefed two large monkeys off their backs: first, they saw off a Munster team in a big Croke Park game, and second, they showed they can win without Peter Canavan carrying them.
Canavan, of course, is without doubt the finest footballer never to have won an All-Ireland medal in modern times. He and his coruscating young apprentice, Eoin Mulligan, have racked up 3-58 between them in the championship so far, and his display against Down in the Ulster final replay, when he banged over 11 points, was surely the individual performance of the summer. The psychological boost Tyrone will have gained after losing him to injury early in the Kerry game, and then still being able to win pulling up, is incalculable.
And if, god forbid, they have to resort to the mullocking, pulling and dragging against Armagh, they won’t care. After all, they lost finals in 1986 and 1995 playing football every bit as sweet as the stuff that destroyed Down and Fermanagh.
The frightening thing about Tyrone is that, with the demise of players such as Chris Lawn, the age profile of their team is relatively young, Canavan notwithstanding. If they win this one they could go on and win two or three more before 2007. Bad news for the rest of the country, but good for the one remaining big county never to have lifted Sam.