‘Learning how to kill game off’ is key for Armagh – McNulty

Yogi Berra, the baseball legend with his own unique flourish for mangling the English language, was more a Yankees man than a Geezer believer. But one of his more famous aphorisms – “It’s deja vu all over again” – could well have been coined for the current Armagh team.

Another Ulster final that goes to extra-time, and penalties, ends in that familiar empty feeling. For 2023 against Derry read 2024 against Donegal. But there’s no time for self-pity . . . and just like last year, their All-Ireland group campaign now starts at home to Westmeath.

Enda McNulty won his first Ulster SFC medal in 1999 and his seventh in 2008. Sixteen years later, Armagh are still awaiting their next provincial title.

For most of his career he soldiered alongside Kieran McGeeney, fellow son of Mullaghbawn, now in his 10th year as Armagh boss. McNulty travelled to the recent provincial final with his comrades from ’99, who were honoured as Ulster GAA’s jubilee team in Clones.

“To go to the game with all those gladiators was a huge inspiration to all of us,” McNulty (right) relates. “Some of them I haven’t met in 25 years, literally. We were all gutted [afterwards] . . . it was like a morgue on the bus even though we had won seven Ulsters, a lot of us.

“So, we were bloody gutted and we’ve no involvement with playing on the team or coaching the team. So I can’t imagine how the poor players and the coaches feel.

“They must have been really, really gutted on Monday, Tuesday,” McNulty continues. “But by Thursday, I’d say they were starting to lift their eyes up and going, ‘OK, we were beaten on penalties, we performed by and large very well, we can cry into our soup or we can lift our heads and our hearts and try and go on to the next step, get through to the quarter-final or the All-Ireland semi-final and let’s see where that takes us.’

“I’ve no doubt in the character of the coaches; I’ve no doubt in their mental toughness, their resilience and persistence, it’s just phenomenal. I just hope that they can figure a way to become toughened by events rather than it impacts their confidence and belief.”

The 2002 All-Ireland winner has harnessed the lessons of his own playing days through his professional career with McNulty, a consultancy agency that specialises in performance coaching and leadership as a means of unlocking potential.

The current generation’s potential has met the unlikeliest of glass ceilings – a scarcely believable four penalty shoot-out defeats in three seasons. But perhaps the bigger life lesson should focus on why Armagh have allowed all these games to go the distance. Against Donegal, they led by four points after the third quarter and didn’t score again until the seventh minute of extra-time.

McNulty agrees that Armagh were “playing very well” until the last 15 minutes of normal time.

Even as Donegal came storming back and went for it, “Armagh continued to play well. Did they kill the game off? They definitely didn’t kill the game off,” he accepts.

“I know that the coaches and the players have been working on that, learning how to kill the game off with 15 minutes or five minutes to go, so the other team actually knows there’s no chance – ‘forget about it, this is lockdown’. So that is a learning for the team. I’ve no doubt that the players and coaches will be addressing that.”

Armagh get back on the horse this Saturday at the BOX-IT Athletic Grounds. As a bare minimum, McGeeney will demand a repeat result of last year’s group opener . . . but he’ll surely want a much better performance.

Then, they struggled for long periods against Westmeath and it took a 68th-minute goal from Conor Turbitt, laced with an element of luck, to secure a one-point win.

The Armagh team that McNulty played with included multiple leaders, not just McGeeney but also current GAA president Jarlath Burns, who retired soon after skippering his county to that breakthrough Ulster win in ’99.

Several others, like Ger Houlahan, Mark McNeill and John Rafferty, were all gone by 2002 while Gerard Reid was by then on the bench and was forced to retire soon after through injury.

“They were almost forgotten about, nobody talked about them. Yet they were the ones that really forged a culture, and mentored people like me in knowing how to win games,” McNulty recalls.

Knowing how to win – Armagh’s biggest challenge in the weeks, or even months, to come.