Armagh Senior Football Championship final: Crossmaglen Rangers v St Mary’s Granemore (tomorrow, the Athletic Grounds, 4.15pm)
By Andy Watters
NIALL McAleenan first met the Granemore footballers on November 28 last year. Tomorrow, 11 months on from that initial get-together, he’ll give them their final instructions before they take the field for their club’s first-ever senior championship decider.
It’s a remarkable story which ends (in this Armagh season) the way it started – against Crossmaglen. Down native McAleenan made his managerial debut in the Orchard county in a Division 1A encounter against Cross in April and Granemore came out on the wrong side of a 1-11 to 1-9 scoreline, Beaten, but not by much.
“If people had said after the first round of league matches that we get to the championship final not too many would have believed them,” said McAleenan.
“But I did have real faith in the team. I felt that if we could get all our players back we could make improvements in our own performances. Belief has improved and our communication on the pitch and our game-management has improved with every game.
“There hasn’t been one game in the championship so far that I felt we couldn’t win but I knew we had to perform to the best of our ability to do that.”
McAleenan’s men accounted for Pearse Og in the first round of the championship and then beat a Mullaghbawn side that had dethroned reigning champions Clann Eireann at the quarter-final stage. Armagh panellist Kieran Doyle got the vital goal midway through the second half to see them to the semi-final – just the fifth in the club’s history. An unfortunate goalkeeping gaffe led the way to an opportunist goal from Tony McClelland in that semi and another from Odhran Doyle saw Granemore through to tomorrow’s showpiece.
McAleenan, who took Warrenpoint to within a whisker of winning the Down Championship in 2019, knows Cross are “huge, huge favourites” but his focus is where it should be - getting the best out of his players.
“If you look at the Cross full-forward line I would say that it’s possibly the best in Ulster club football at the minute,” he said.
“So that’s a huge, huge task and you can’t focus on the three fellas in the full-forward line (Jamie Clarke, Rian O’Neill and Cian McConville) because they’ve got game-changers all over. Aaron Kernan is playing wing half-back and he’s a Rolls Royce of a player. They are very strong in the middle of the field and they have a very strong half-forward line as well so it’s going to be hard all over pitch.
“We are going to have to work as a collective and have a real togetherness in our performance and go out and give it our very, very best.
Granemore’s success is built on their miserly defence and a handy knack of forcing goal chances – and taking them – at vital moments. They enjoyed the rub of the green in the semi-final but haven’t conceded a goal in the championship and in the quarter and semi-finals restricted their opponents to single-figure tallies.
“From the last few rounds of the league we have been improving steadily,” said McAleenan.
“We had boys who were injured all year back and we had Ross (Finn) and Kieran Doyle back from the county so that has made a real impact on our defensive play.
“We took one game at a time and we set ourselves different targets that we wanted from each of those games – so times we hit them, sometimes we don’t. Hopefully we’ll do that in the final.”
