Preview: Canny Kerry can quell semi newbies Armagh

In the midst of another post-mortem on the Kerry-Derry debacle, Jack O’Connor cited their last championship meeting with Armagh as an example of what Gaelic football could be – or once was.

That was the game, back in 2006, which probably heralded the end of Armagh’s time as a nailed-on All-Ireland contender and marked the moment when Kerry got a handle on the Ulster uprising.

Kieran Donaghy, in his breakout summer as an inter-county target man, fired home the game’s critical score, Kerry’s second goal shortly after half-time and then stood over goalkeeper Paul Hearty, snarling. It was a roar of Kerry defiance in the face of the northern upstarts. An empire strikes back roar.

There was plenty of sulphur in the air that afternoon. It was also the day when Paul Galvin and Armagh waterboy John Toal engaged in a UFC grappling match by the Hogan Stand sideline, Joe Kernan frantically trying to break them apart, before himself falling into a rather heated dispute with linesman Gerry Kinneavey.

This weekend, Donaghy will be in his Armagh top and peaked cap, attempting to plot the downfall of his own county.

“We’d love to go back to that era,” O’Connor said in his press briefing earlier this week. “That was an absolutely epic game, one of the games (outside of All-Irelands) that stands out in my head. But football has changed dramatically in the meantime and we had to change with it.”

The Kerry manager has warned us to expect a different kind of match this Saturday, more in line with what we’ve become used to.

O’Connor had again been fielding questions about the now infamously tedious quarter-final win over Derry.

State-of-the-game debates are a constant in Gaelic football – and there certainly has been plenty of time to engage in them while the half-backs and corner-backs are passing the ball sideways to one another.

The aftermath of the Derry match went well beyond the usual keening and may have secured a few more votes for the recently trialled ‘experimental’ rules when they do reach the Congress floor.

O’Connor readily agreed the game wasn’t one for the ages and implicitly acknowledged that rule changes are probably required. But the four-time All-Ireland winning boss is also an arch-pragmatist and he was quick to stress that Kerry have been burned before.

He instanced the surprise loss to Tyrone in the 2021 All-Ireland semi-final, when Kerry were too adventurous against a counter-attacking outfit and wound up with a turnover tally that exceeded 30 across 90 minutes of football.

In that light, Kerry were ultra-cautious about minding the ball. Too much so? O’Connor conceded the possibility but said his players’ carefulness in possession was understandable given the approach of the opposition. The bottom line is that they won – anything else is a matter for the legislators.

The quarter-final wasn’t the only ‘modern football, wha?’ style talking point from Kerry’s mostly low-key campaign. Their prolific nominal corner-back Tom O’Sullivan is currently neck and neck with chief marksman Seanie O’Shea in the points from play column this season. He was ahead of him until O’Shea clipped over a late score as they belatedly kicked for home against Derry.

Back-to-back Footballer of the Year David Clifford has 2-11 from play in six games and has been more subdued this summer. His two goals arrived late on in the one-sided win over Meath, after what had been an uneven performance.

They got the Southgate draw in the group phase and found the going considerably easier than in the long derided Munster football championship. Monaghan, Meath and Louth were all dismissed in breezy fashion and by double-digit margins.

Before that, Cork and Clare had given them reasonably decent games in the Munster championship, though the stakes never felt especially high. Paudie Clifford’s comically understated trophy lift in Ennis won’t feature in too many heroic montage videos.

One wrinkle is the lack of goals. They’ve failed to find the net in four of the six games, firing a brace apiece against Meath and Louth. There certainly were goals there for them against Monaghan though the fisted point was in vogue that day.

Low-stress runs to the latter stages are nothing new for Kerry, who were at least forced to dig deep in the quarter-final this year, in contrast to 2023.

For Armagh to get back to the semi-finals has been a much more winding and torturous road.

Kieran McGeeney was still centre-back the last time they reached this stage in 2005, when Peter Canavan’s injury-time free pipped them in a thrilling game.

They won two Ulster titles subsequent to that, in 2006 and 2008, but lost in the quarter-final in each year. The former was the aforementioned Kerry loss, the latter was a shock defeat following a late Mattie Forde salvo for Wexford. The county retreated to the middle of the pack thereafter and only emerged intermittently in the next decade.

McGeeney, the longest serving inter-county manager since Colm Collins’ departure in Clare, took long enough to turn the tanker around. It wasn’t until his fifth season in charge that they recorded a first win in Ulster and he likely wouldn’t have been afforded that time if it wasn’t for his famous playing career.

Against that, there were the usual unfalsifiable arguments about how well they could expect to be doing, McGeeney’s defenders pointing to the crop of players and noting that Armagh haven’t, at least until very recently, been pulling up trees at underage level with no Ulster U20 title since 2007.

Recent years have seen him maligned for their agonising failure to get over the line in successive Ulster finals, losing in penalty shootouts in 2023 and 2024. Leading by four against Donegal in May, they clammed up in sight of the finish line, which was taken by some as evidence of psychological weakness, with McGeeney’s highly-strung persona on the line not helping.

As in last year, they recovered well to nab top spot in the group of death.

Their somewhat expensive half-time team talk in Markievicz Park – the county board gets fined for every minute over the 15 – proved a worthy investment. After Sean Hurson eventually persuaded them to come out of the dressing room, they dug out an unlikely draw against Galway to secure top spot and an express ticket to the quarters.

The quarter-final against Roscommon in a rain-sodden HQ wasn’t exactly champagne stuff, Armagh managing the game to a relatively comfortable conclusion against 14 men.

A third consecutive quarter-final defeat might have been hard to recover from, but a semi-final appearance counts as very concrete evidence of progress.

The Geezer Out signs that sprang up in pockets of south Armagh in recent years have been shelved for the time being.

Conor Turbitt has emerged as an All-Star in waiting, with 3-10 from play in the championship, 2-10 of which has been scored since the Ulster final. Oisín Conaty filled his boots against Roscommon, landing four from play on an afternoon when scores were slow to arrive.

The all-singing, all-dancing demolition of an admittedly porous Derry rearguard in the group stage in Celtic Park was a high-point, the purists pointing to what they could achieve when the shackles were left at home.

However, their default approach of late has been more cautious than that. Their curious habit of playing down – or up – to the level of their opposition perhaps suggests a tendency to overthink things.

Darran O’Sullivan said this week that Kerry would have no trouble winning “boring” again if Armagh set up in a defensive counter-attacking shape.

“I’m hoping Kerry are a bit braver and Armagh are too because we need a good game of football,” he added.

Whether Armagh return to their cavalier 2022 incarnation or adopt a more controlled and cagey gameplan, the likelihood is that Kerry will be able to cope regardless.

It may not be the anarchic, rollercoaster affair of 18 years ago but Kerry should have the experience and quality to ensure the end result is the same.

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Watch the All-Ireland Football Championship semi-finals, Armagh v Kerry (5.30pm on Saturday on RTÉ2) and Donegal v Galway (4pm on Sunday on RTÉ2). Both games available on RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app and listen to commentary on RTÉ Radio 1

Watch Down v Laois in the Tailteann Cup final on Saturday from 2.45pm on RTE2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app and listen to commentary on RTÉ Radio 1