Ulster Senior Football Championship preliminary round: Armagh 0-20 Antrim 1-8
WITH a gutsy Antrim taken care of in business-like fashion, it was time to nail the “WhatsApp bullshit” that swirled around the Armagh camp for the last number of weeks
Ever since Rian O’Neill was withdrawn in the 66th minute against Galway, and when relegation followed against Tyrone, the rumour-mill went into over-drive in the Orchard County.
Anonymous WhatsApp messages claiming this, that and the other were instinctively shared and “spread like wild-fire”.
Leaning against the wall a few metres from the Armagh changing room on Saturday evening, selector Kieran Donaghy addressed one of the scourges of modern-day life.
In the midst of giving an impassioned defence of Kieran McGeeney’s eight-year managerial reign of Armagh, Donaghy addressed the problems that come with “nonsense WhatsApp messages”.
“A lot of it is out of our control,” Donaghy said. “That WhatsApp bullshit, you know what I mean? There is nonsense in that. I got it. You got it. It’s all that kind of nonsense.
“I talked about it in my own book: WhatsApp rumours are a thing that has infiltrated groups in the last 10 years and we have to catch ourselves on in what we forward, what we send and what we take for gospel in what we read in a WhatsApp group.
“I think until you’ve been hit by it, it’s instinctive, you send to your nine groups and it’s wild-fire. But, yeah, it was a lot of nonsense.
“I think the work that Kieran has done with Rian over the years and the bond that they have is strong. We put it to bed and we really focused on Antrim and it was a key time for us. ‘Geezer’ got that right in the dressing room after the Tyrone game and it was about getting a run in the Championship.”
Even in the absence of Rian O’Neill, Jarlath Burns and Andrew Murnin, Armagh looked in cruise control throughout against Antrim with Championship debutant Shane McPartlan and Conor Turbitt the outstanding performers in Saturday's Ulster SFC preliminary clash.
McGeeney has kept a discreet distance between himself and the media throughout Armagh’s erratic NFL campaign, but faced the music after his side were relegated in their last Division One game against Tyrone.
The tactical direction of travel of this Armagh team has been open to scrutiny – but what frustrated Donaghy has been the “shortness of memory” of the critics.
“It’s probably frustrating, slightly because the group knows how hard Kieran McGeeney works for this team and what he’s done in the last eight years,” said the affable Kerry man.
“He’s in the gym two nights a week with them and on the pitch three times a week. He links in with them all the time, he helps them in their private lives and with issues away from the pitch. It’s an all-consuming role which really opened my eyes when I came here and saw how much he does for guys away from the pitch.
“Of course there was frustration as we wanted to win all the games in the League, we were here against Galway, we were a minute away from potentially going to Tyrone and being in a League final, and you lose a last-minute goal and you’ve to go to Healy Park against a Tyrone team that are flying and you come out the wrong side of a very good game, it’s just frustrating…”
Donaghy added: “It’s the shortness of memory, I would feel, because I came up here in 2011 [with Kerry] in a League game when Armagh were in Division One and two years later they were down in Division Three.
“Kieran came up here when they were in Division Three and for many they were a long, long way from being in the shake-up of the season.
“To bring them from there to where we were last year and going toe-to-toe with Galway [in an All-Ireland quarter-final] – we could have won that game very easily if we were a bit more experienced in that kind of scenario and to bring that Galway team down the stretch – and you saw how they went against Kerry in the All-Ireland final, that’s a long road.”
