Tyrone v Armagh - GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Championship Quarter-Final
By Paul Keane
Kieran McGeeney believes an 18-point All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Tyrone failed to reflect the true quality of his Armagh players.
The Armagh manager described the season as 'a mixed bag', noting that they reached the last eight of the Championship though acknowledging their failure to gain promotion from Division 3 and a disappointing Ulster loss to Down.
"We showed a fair few chinks this year," said McGeeney. "We should have got out of Division 3, we didn't, but we scored highly. Then we had our chance to beat Down in the Ulster championship, but we didn't.
"Coming up here today you're probably coming up against the best defensive unit in the country in terms of how Tyrone play that. It shouldn't have taken them by surprise or shocked them but we seemed to struggle to deal with it.
"Overall, it's a mixed bag. I don't think today probably reflects how good the team is but it does reflect how they're able to deal with that type of defence. But then every team that has gone before them found it difficult to deal with as well.
"You have to be able to move the ball quick, you have to be able to commit men to the attack, more than ones and twos, it needs to be threes and fours and they didn't have that.
"That's why some of our better forwards were easily suffocated, because they didn't have those runners off the shoulder. They showed glimpses of it for 20 minutes in the second-half but when the chances were there they didn't take them and if there's nothing there to fight for, sometimes the team will just lose heart."
Tyrone v Armagh - GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Championship Quarter-Final
McGeeney said it was hard to paint a positive picture after such a convincing defeat.
"It is what it is, I can't really say much more," said the 2002 All-Ireland winning captain. "When the game is over you're left with the facts staring you in the face. We retracted into our shell a wee bit, missed easy chances, ran into cul-de-sacs. I think we're a better team than we showed but that's just the way it went today.
"There's probably a number of factors for it. We played a certain way all year and then when you miss one or two players, that can have a bit of an effect on it. We didn't react well at the start, we wanted to move the ball quickly but didn't and got caught up. I didn't feel that we committed enough men to attack, it was ones and twos instead of threes and fours and lads got caught on their own and were suffocated. Tyrone are very good at that, they've been working on that for a while. Armagh are just going to have to learn how to deal with that."
McGeeney had praise for Tyrone who march forward to the All-Ireland semi-finals with hopes of another title success.
"Any mistake, they pounced on it," he said. "I think they had a 65 per cent shooting accuracy compared to 30 per cent for us. There's a whole lot of things that add up to the result. It wasn't a good day at the office for the boys but I do believe they're better than that."
