Today's game is a difficult one to predict. At the start of the season, Monaghan were relegation candidates alongside ourselves, Kildare, and Donegal. Monaghan would have been targeting this game for two points and know they would have had time to build up towards it. Contrary to what experts have been saying, we are not at peak fitness, and whilst Monaghan might have improved over the last two weeks I doubt McGeeney would have had the players sitting around. I think we are going to see a much improved Armagh team today than what we have seen for 30 odd minutes in the last few weeks and this will give us an edge on Monaghan.
Although we have improved defensively we are still conceding more points on average (average is 28) compared to the rest of the league - only slightly. We have conceded 30 points which is only second to Dublin at 39. However, we are outscoring division 1 41 compared to the average of 28. The forwards are coming on but we are missing goal-scoring opportunities in the last two games despite scoring 4 goals already. Today we are going up against one of the best teams defensively (statistically anyway) who have conceded on average 15.5 against Mayo and Tyrone. However, the concern for Monaghan would be their average of 13 points per game.