“I'll go to my grave with that regret" - Armagh legend Enda McNulty bemoans All-Ireland failure

Former Armagh defender Enda McNulty has hailed the current team’s “mental toughness and grit” as they face their stiffest challenge yet on Saturday.

Although it’s Armagh’s first All-Ireland semi-final in 19 years, their recent record in Championship football would suggest that they ought to be competing in the latter stages more often.

In their last 18 Championship games, Armagh have been beaten just once in 70 minutes, that being an Ulster quarter-final against Donegal two years ago.

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Penalties have been their undoing, however, having lost four shootouts to Galway, Monaghan, Derry and Donegal in the past three seasons, though they finally broke their quarter-final duck with the recent win over Roscommon.

“Their consistency of performance has been excellent over the last five years,” says McNulty, well known these days for his work as a sports psychologist across a range of codes.

“I think the fact they haven’t been beaten in normal time over those years obviously will give them more confidence and belief.

“This time has clearly built significant resilience and mental toughness and grit. They obviously have an incredibly good mindset in how they bounce back from all of those defeats on penalties.

“However, I think they’re grounded in the reality of the challenge that lies ahead. This is going to be a mammoth challenge. There’s nobody in Armagh – whether they’re a fan or a player or a coach or a parent of any of the current group – that looks at this and goes, ‘This is going to be easy’ or it’s even going to be relatively hard.

“This is going to be incredibly tough. And I believe that it’s always brilliant to go into a game knowing you’re going to have one of the toughest battles of your football career – because that means you have to be at your best, mentally, emotionally, technically, tactically, leadership-wise, belief-wise, mindset-wise.

“I think that’s always a good place to go into the game. Where you go into the game thinking you should be ok, it’s almost like an alarm bell going off in a building.

“The alarm is going off and it’s a nice and quiet alarm – but eventually it’s a major alarm. And unfortunately I’ve been in Armagh changing rooms when that happens. We should have won big games against teams that were not nearly as good as us, but because we thought we should be ok…

“Armagh know they’re going to be at or near their best to beat Kerry at the weekend, and I think that’s a brilliant psychological footstone.”

McNulty credits his former teammate Kieran McGeeney with how he has moulded this Armagh team, but he doesn’t see this game as a one-off opportunity that they must make the most of.

“I do think, whether they win or lose at the weekend, they’ll keep growing, they’ll go up to the next level because this is still a relatively young team.

“It’s about the whole journey, not whether you win or lose this weekend. It’s what can they do in the next five years.

It’s the first meeting of the counties in the Championship since the 2006 All-Ireland quarter-final, a game won by Kerry, who kicked on to win three of the next four titles, but it effectively marked the end of the Armagh side that McNulty played on as a serious force.

"That game was intriguing. I remember Séamus Moynihan in the second half tactically sat in the middle and stopped us being able to get early ball into the brilliant full-forward line that we had.

“Tactically I think Kerry made a decision at half-time to change.

“I was marking Colm Cooper that day and I had a really good game on Cooper. I was having one of my best games.

“But then I remember giving away a stupid handpass, Darran O'Sullivan got the ball and it was his first big goal in Croke Park. So there was a big momentum shift.

“The other thing I would say about what happened to Armagh after 2006, I think '06 and '07 was obviously the end for that great Armagh team. We never won enough during that time.

“We'll go to our graves with that regret. I cannot mince my words on that.

“I'll go to my grave with the regret that we didn't win more All-Irelands. I wouldn't try to plamás that by putting lovely, glossy language around that. But I literally, every single day, think about how we never won more All Irelands.”

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