THE Armagh players and management could torture themselves by insisting they shouldn’t be anywhere near a Division One relegation play-off and that their three performances over the last few weeks merited more than what they got.
Welcome to the thinner air and fine margins of Division One football – where a width of a goal-post or fouling the ball deep in opposition territory can be the difference between finishing top or tumbling to third.
Armagh, as it happened, tumbled from first to third on the last day of the round robin series against Donegal. Four points up with six minutes of normal time remaining, Armagh threw it away or Donegal clawed it back.
Take your pick.
In any case, Donegal got back on level terms – 1-16 to 1-16 – to claim top spot.
Training has just finished on a beautiful evening in Callanbridge and Rory Grugan takes refuge against the wall of one of the portacabins.
In those decisive, final 10 minutes, when their fate was decided, Grugan reflects on the ‘coachable’ and the ‘uncoachable’ elements of those crucial plays.
“It is a bit of both,” he says. “Some stuff is coachable, and some stuff is not coachable. Sometimes in the heat of battle you just have to get a wee bit of luck but you also need that wee bit of know-how.
“The more you are exposed to that, the more experience you get, the better you do it the next time you are there. So, we have had some of those harsh lessons and maybe Donegal was another one.
“Then there’s the coachable stuff, the split decisions, the things like winning break balls from our own restarts and how we use it when we get it.
“We got up the field a couple of times and the poor execution of a hand-pass and the unlucky shot off the post and stuff.
“All fine margins… It’s the unmeasurable as well as the wee things you try to work on, on the training pitch, the stuff that is coachable.”
It’s the first time since Kieran McGeeney took the reins that Armagh have breached top flight football. It's somewhere they sorely want to stay.
For large swathes of their games against Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal there was so much to admire but also lessons in how to game-manage better.
For what seemed like an eternity in those final 10 minutes, goalkeeper Blaine Hughes couldn’t find a way past the Donegal midfield.
A split second’s hesitation from Connaire Mackin saw him foul the ball. Thirteen patient passes later, Ciaran Thompson split Armagh’s posts.
And yet, had Conor Turbitt’s stoppage-time effort squeezed inside the left-hand goalpost and not hit it, Armagh would have gone two up and sealed the game.
In those closing stages, Grugan drifted back into his own half of the field to try and stymie Donegal’s attacks.
“In terms of our set-up, I was slightly deeper in the second half anyway and then in the last 10 minutes you find yourself tracking back.
“My legs were going at that stage, with a bit of cramp in the last few minutes, I couldn’t get back up as far as I wanted.
“I suppose it is natural how you drift back and then you still want players like myself, ‘Soupy’ [Campbell] and Rian [O’Neill] getting on the end of things to get scores at the other end too.
“You can’t be content to sit back and just try and see it out and obviously there is a bit of game-management in that too, so it is something to learn.”
On Roscommon’s last visit to the Athletic Grounds last October they edged out their hosts despite the Orchard men dominating the first half.
The counties, who both gained promotion last season, played out a memorable Championship encounter in 2018 down in O’Moore Park, an enthralling shoot-out won by the Connacht men, and while Armagh remain committed to attacking play, the Rossies, under Anthony Cunningham, are not as free-flowing or as open as they were under Kevin McStay.
Armagh, meanwhile, can tentatively claim that they have made successful tweaks to their attacking system following last November’s Championship collapse to semi-final opponents Donegal at Breffni Park.
The arrival of former Kerry ace Kieran Donaghy has undoubtedly aided that process.
"The big thing was that we felt that we didn’t leave it all out there against Donegal last year and that we didn’t really go at them. I suppose the way the game has gone now that is not the really defensive game that maybe it was six or seven years ago, and we felt that we didn’t really go with numbers in our attack last year.
"We got isolated and we were getting turned over and Donegal were coming down with a wee bit of wind and punishing us...
"Whereas now I suppose you really have to go in numbers, you see how open and free-flowing the football has been across all four divisions and it has been brilliant for the neutrals.
"It is a good sign of the way the game is going. Everyone attacks from everywhere and if you are a corner-forward you can expect to be at your own end line tracking the corner-back and vice versa. So, you have to attack as a unit and be cohesive while minding the house at the back, so hopefully we have improved on that a small bit.
"It is also about upping those totals. If you are hitting 18 or 20 points you will be on the winning side of it. And as much as people might think that McGeeney, as a defender, would look at the defensive side of it, he has always been about playing on the front foot and if you talk to him, he will say that himself, that is the way the game is going, you play front foot football and you outscore your opposition and that is just the way we play it.
"We can be a wee bit better on the nuance of the game and the game management, but it is a nice way to play football and we love it."
