Armagh v Derry

MidMonMan, Pffhh you have a fair cheek on you dont you! Poor poor game today. Im embarrassed for the referee there was way more than 1 minute to be added at the end. I'd say in the 2nd half there was about 15-20 minutes of football. What a pity had plenty of potential

Armagh or Derry did not want to be first out of the Provincial championship. Armagh tried playing football in the second half but towards the end Armagh's discipline went right out of the window. They just wanted to stay in Ulster championship. Wouldnt expect Ulster championship to be exciting this year either.

up.the.oak.trees wrote:MidMonMan, Pffhh you have a fair cheek on you dont you! Poor poor game today. Im embarrassed for the referee there was way more than 1 minute to be added at the end. I'd say in the 2nd half there was about 15-20 minutes of football. What a pity had plenty of potential

I've nothing against Derry UTOT, but surely you can't argue much that Derry were poor today?! They just weren't good enough on the day, that's the fact of the matter, and I'd say most Derry folk would agree that their team have again played well below their potential and are now staring at the qualifier draw already in May. Will there be people calling for Cassidy's head in Derry now or will he be given another shot at Ulster next year regardless of how the qualifiers pan out?

To be honest I dont know what the story is with DC, I hear everyone saying they want rid of him but I think he is the right man for the job but something just isnt clicking, Somewhere it is going wrong and he just cant put his finger to the problem, It is terrible to think that we didn't make it past the 1st match never mind no back to back wins in Ulster this year we have nothing, Hopefully Derry can pick it up in time for their qualifier match. Fair play to Armagh and Goodluck to Monaghan

A dismal game to start the C'ship in earnest (Galway in NY doesn't count). Yes a poor ref and some stupid s****y rule changes didn't help. But the two teams set out their stall to play defensive football and it was bloody awful to watch. Spillane was right in what he said at half time. I tipped Derry but if they got Carlow in the qualifiers I wouldn't pick them. They are shocking and had nothing to offer in the final third at all. Armagh were adequate with Stevie Mc his usual classy stuff and a good showing from Vernon and a couple of others. I don't see any team in Ulster losing sleep tonight though.

Dreadful stuff though tbh.

Here J, this is what im liking about this Armagh team. They are well equipped to play both defensive and attacking football.

Ok - I'll come back with a judgment on that when they play some attacking stuff.

Jayo Cluxton wrote:Ok - I'll come back with a judgment on that when they play some attacking stuff.

Wouldn't expect it in the Monaghan match, its going to be the same as today I am afraid.

Not defending the performance today, it was dull stuff but wasnt the worst game in recent years.

Look - a win is a win but it was dismal fare. Seemed too that Armagh had more fans than Derry! I just hate that kind of football and can't see how Peter Mc will say 'OK lads we'll defend this week' and then say 'OK lads we'll play attacking this week'. No - I reckon this is the way Armagh will play this season. Sooner you than me following it. Ironic thing is they have the players up front to play a more offensive and expansive style.

Jayo Cluxton wrote:Look - a win is a win but it was dismal fare. Seemed too that Armagh had more fans than Derry! I just hate that kind of football and can't see how Paddy Mc will say 'OK lads we'll defend this week' and then say 'OK lads we'll play attacking this week'. No - I reckon this is the way Armagh will play this season. Sooner you than me following it. Ironic thing is they have the players up front to play a more offensive and expansive style.

Paddy O'Rouke said in the interview that Armagh started playing negative when they went ahead. He didnt instruct them to do it, but in the end it worked for us. I also thought that they should have pushed on and put more points on the board.

If there is a game in Ulster this year that will allow open football, Armagh are well capable of competing. For the first time in years, almost every county could win Ulster and I think it is going to put all teams in a defensive mentality because they are scared of losing it.

Thought Armagh were impressive enough today. Vernon is some player in MF. Stevie Mac continues to dazzle up front and if he can keep it up with Ronan Clarke yet to come back in they can lead their team to the Ulster crown this year. The other Clarke took his goal really well today so they have strength in depth. Paddy O Rourke doing a fine job by the looks of things. Derry continue to frustrate. They've gone from mediocre to s**te this year. A case of backwards and downwards for them yet again.

What a terrible excuse for a game of football.. The players did their best to ruin it and the ref got in on the act too.. I'd say there was an average of 20 seconds of play between each free. I thought the Bradleys looked very uninterested especially Eoin. Dismal start to the Championship.

Stevie from Keleavy did brighten things up a bit and Vernon is a great footballer. Is the goal scorer a brother of Ronan Clarke's?

Jonsmith wrote:What a terrible excuse for a game of football.. The players did their best to ruin it and the ref got in on the act too.. I'd say there was an average of 20 seconds of play between each free. I thought the Bradleys looked very uninterested especially Eoin. Dismal start to the Championship.

Stevie from Keleavy did brighten things up a bit and Vernon is a great footballer. Is the goal scorer a brother of Ronan Clarke's?

Dont think so. Jamie is from Crossmaglen.

absolutely horrible game to watch neither team having the balls to attack the other. What i dont understand is the same system didnt work for Derry last year in Ulster so what made Cassidy think this year would be any different.

Once again they were caught out with no plan B and very few options when it came to getting scores. Doesnt say much for the forwards when a half back steps up to hit a penalty and judging by the poor effort he hadnt hit one before.

That said Armagh were little better - take McDonnell out of the equation and you'd wonder were they'd be. Swift was a virtual spectator and Henderson hit some terrible wides. Vernon was the one positive from the match a very good footballer and strong as an ox.

Still haven't seen the game but by all accounts it was Junior B standard stuff! At least i can take heart from the fact i didn't come on here spouting that Derry would definately win and that we should sack DC if we don't!

Simple fact is we are a county that hasn't been in the top 6 to 8 teams in the county for the last 5 or so years and we have to start realising that a good run in the championship will be more down to good fortune that a good team!!

That said, well done Armagh and best of luck to ye in the USFC!

Brilliant article here in the Irish Times here, enjoy and comment on -

Derry must learn how to express themselves

TOM HUMPHRIES

LOCKER ROOM : The northern county may be better off taking the long route around in the qualifiers

FUNNY JOB this. Cyclical. There was a time when the GAA in Derry was thriving you could hit the road Easy Rider style and end up in Celtic Park four, five or six times a year. Now it’s a rare adventure to hit Derry at all. Sign of the footballing times.

Celtic Park. It’s a funny ground, full of imperfections, not least the spanking new press box which denies hacks a view of 15 metres worth of the pitch in from the near touchline below and yet it is charming.

I love the drive over the Foyle, and instead of following the road back along the river it’s always more interesting to digress slightly into the little streets of the Bogside and take a bow to Free Derry corner before swinging back towards the hill and addressing the impossibility of getting a parking spot.

From inside the precinct you can see the graveyard sloping ominously down the hill toward Lonemore Road, and peek next door at the Brandywell, home of Derry City’s beloved Candystripes and the dog racing.

That’s another oddity of the Celtic Park experience. The ground is placed directly in that part of the county where the games of football and hurling are least loved. This is soccer territory, and those who bother to make the journey to Celtic Park have headed west from the hamlets of Lavey and Bellaghy and Ballinderry, etc, where football is a fundamentalist faith. Celtic Park should be transplanted to fields there.

Yesterday, only 10,000 or so bothered to make the journey to Celtic Park. As is their wont, the cognoscenti of Derry were more pessimistic about their side’s chances than the rest of us were.

Derry’s decline post 1993 is a mystery and a sorrowful one at that. That trio of northern teams who broke through back then had such distinctive personalities that it seemed their impact on the game would be long-lasting to the point of permanence.

Down had that insouciance which is the mark of their teams and their home. Never beaten in an All-Ireland final, never beaten by Kerry. But hey, no big deal either.

Donegal, with their inexplicable addiction to hand-passing, won an All-Ireland in 1992 with a full back, Matt Gallagher, who didn’t kick the ball once on the All-Ireland final day.

Funny, that Donegal team don’t really stand in the memory as models of iron discipline compared to the outfits that followed, but somehow Brian McEniff had such an innate understanding of the moods and whims of his countymen he was able to focus them and cajole them for long enough to take them to glory.

And then Eamon Coleman’s Derry. The most distinctive of the three counties who broke through. They had such a sharp intelligence about them, such an awareness within the group of their strengths and weaknesses as a team that they were destined to win an All-Ireland.

Possibly they were destined for the disintegration which followed, but the county board at the time can take the lions’ share of the credit for that.

They were the most traditional of the sides who dominated in those times. Brian McGilligan and Anthony Tohill in the middle. The cerebration of Henry Downey at centre back. A couple of corner backs who should have been jailers. Johnny McGurk’s magical sallies from wing back. The impossible glamour of Joe Brolly! Spoofer McNicholl!

They didn’t have it all, but they had most of what you would want if you were stitching a classic Gaelic football team together.

And at the heart of it was Eamon Coleman, the mischievous maestro. It had been so long since we had been in Celtic Park and there had been so many occasions when we made our way down to the dressingroom area to be berated or entertained by him that we actually had to remind ourselves he wouldn’t be there yesterday.

“Youse Boys” he would call us in the midst of a wry but passionate denunciation which paid scant heed to the diversity of age or gender among the press corps “youse boys know nathin about football”.

His accent was odd even for Derry and always seemed to have hints of Scottishness in it. Sometimes he’d come at us in a genuine rage, more often he would scold us for effect: neither option made him any the less likeable or fun. He held no grudges. Had no malice.

And he knew what we didn’t know. How to run a Derry football team.

I often think of him when I read textbooks or life-stories concerning coaching and management. He was proof, indelible and incontrovertible, that there is no single template for doing it right. He was neither patrician nor authoritarian. He wasn’t scary and he was friendlier with his players than any textbook would permit.

But he was shrewd and cunning and had passion and could persuade any player to do anything. Once, for an All-Ireland semi-final, he persuaded the immensely likeable Danny Quinn to go along with the pretence that he had been picked to play on the Sunday at full back. Danny, knowing he wasn’t playing and as a proud Bellaghy man somewhat devastated by the knowledge, had to let on to all and sundry he was starting. It was a tough one. Players are often asked to take one for the team. Only Coleman could have asked for and got such a sacrifice.

Watching Derry yesterday it was hard to avoid the remembrance of times past. They were flat and insipid, and, knowing Damian Cassidy and the influence which Eamon Coleman had on him in his day, you knew that here was another Bellaghy man who would be hurting badly last night.

There are few things tougher than following in the footsteps of such greatness and getting the feeling that you aren’t quite filling the space.

Derry, though, may be better off taking the long route around in the qualifiers. They have so much talent that it it going to take games on white-hot Sundays to make it all gel for them.

Derry people driving back across the top of the island last night would have been dismissive of that notion. The response to bad days like yesterday is always to proclaim that the team is going nowhere.

The pessimists need that stout little finger wagged in their faces and to be told they know nathin about football.

Derry have the talent now. As much talent as Eamon Coleman would have surveyed at the beginning of 1993 before he took his boys all the way.

They need the passion and the certainty and to find a way of playing that is an expression of their personality, not a contradiction of it.

Because that was the lesson of the early 1990s. Down, Donegal and Derry all came playing distinct brands of football that belonged to them and which were built for them.

Football needs Derry and Derry needs football. Watching Armagh and Tyrone over the past decade will have been harder in Derry than anywhere else. To see a new northern dynasty spring up from anywhere else in the province would be too much.

Anyway, we enjoy the drive to Celtic Park and all its bizarre quirkiness.

Let’s go again soon.

Read it yesterday. Didn't strike me as brilliant tbh BE.

Complete nonsense, for once, from a fine journalist. Derry have as much talent now as in 1993? Aboslute nonsense.

In 1993 they had the best defence and midfield in Ireland. Of the present side, Gerard O'Kane might replace Fergal McCusker, but no-one else would come close between numbers 1-9. In attack, there was no place for Dermot McNichol in 1993 - what would they give for him now? Paddy Bradley is far from the player he was 2-3 years ago, while Eoin may be more talented than Joe Brolly, but he doesn't have the sense of occasion that Brolly had. Enda Gormley and Seamus Downey were intelligent footballers who scored in big games. Kielt and Mark Lynch still have a lot of improving to do.

Derry are average, and have been for years, compounded by the fact that they now they have a tactically naive manager, who not only has no idea how to line out a side (Bocerty was spot on when he said he can't understand how Cassidy could pick the same poor tactics 2 years running and expect them to suddenly wory), but the players don't even seem to like him, and he struggles to motivate them.

Now, I do think that Derry will improve for the qualifiers, and may linger around for a while, but for Humphries to envisage some dramatic run to glory through the backdoor is highly fanciful.

Yep I fell it was more laced with nostalgia and the wearing of oak tinted lenses than any reality.