Days like Sunday would do you the world of good. I was absolutely elated after that game. I’ll be honest and say I did not see us winning and was half afraid we would get a bit of a going over. I was really worried with the early Tyrone goal, but Armagh settled and I felt went on to dominate the exchanges. We spurned a couple of goal chances in the first half and went in leading by a point when it probably should have been closer to six. I thought that would come back to bite us, but we maintained the belief.
I was sure Tyrone’s stronger bench would have been key, but it was actually our subs who made the difference. Connair Mackin had a magnificent spell, making a couple of key interceptions whilst Andrew Murnin had a brilliant 15 minutes or so, scoring two excellent points. In what was a great team performance, I thought Ethan Rafferty, James Morgan and Soup Campbell stood out for me. Ethan saved a point, was excellent with his kickouts and scored two brilliant points, the first of which was of the jaw dropping variety, as he seemed to drive the ball on a low flat trajectory over the centre of the bar from 55 yards out.
How did it all of this happen? When you look at Tyrone - All Ireland Senior Champions, All Ireland Under 20 Champions and current Ulster Minor Champions, there is a wealth of raw material there. For ourselves, we appear to live on scraps by comparison.
For our players, they disappointed big time in Ballybofey and there seemed to be a realisation that this was the last stand, and possibly of equal, if not more importance, the future of management was likely to be called into question in the event of defeat. What we got was an inspired performance, full of guts, heart and determination which saw individual battles won all over the pitch. Special mention to Connair Mackin who literally put his body on the line.
He has come in for criticism quite often on the pages of this forum, but one thing you can say about Geezer is that he does inspire in his teams absolute loyalty and commitment, and I felt that was the winning of the game yesterday.
The headline on the back of this morning’s Irish News had a quote from Kieran Donaghy in which he stated that it was ‘A big win - but just one win’ and that will have to remain key in the thoughts and approach of the players and management to the Donegal game. It’s fair to say that the draw has landed like a lead balloon, but hopefully the belief instilled from yesterday’s sensational performance can inspire the team to put two big performances back to back and keep our season alive.