Both counties are akin to boxers staring each other down at the weigh-in before sharing a cab back to the hotel
But when it comes to one another, they’re like a pair of boxers who make a show of giving each other death stares at the weigh-in before sharing a cab back to the hotel. The games tend to be sauced every bit as intensely as any others in Ulster but the flavour is rarely bitter.
Karl O’Connell is from Tyholland, a village so close to the Armagh border that the locals’ phones occasionally switch themselves to the UK network without warning. Armagh captain Rory Grugan teaches in St Macartan’s College in Monaghan town, sharing a staff room up until recent years with Monaghan attacker Jack McCarron. Armagh wing forward Jason Duffy is a grandson of legendary Monaghan crooner Big Tom; can’t get more tangled up than that.
“And when it came to playing against them, I think we always felt that they were reachable. If we could get up to their level, then we’d move into that upper echelon of teams that got to compete in Croke Park. After they won the All-Ireland in 2002, everyone in Monaghan was going, ‘Can that not be us?’”
“There has always just been that thing there — we would have gone out in Blayney when I was growing up. Loads of Armagh people would have had their weddings in Monaghan. Loads of them would work in Blayney or Carrick or Monaghan. So just in the way that life goes, everybody would know everybody. There was never any real bad blood in the football as a result.”
“Even this week, all the conversations that you’d have around the place are a wee bit different than if we were playing Tyrone or Down or even Donegal. If it was one of those, you’d be fronting it out, slagging them, trying to get a bit of needle going. But this is a real ‘youse’ll-probably-beat-us’ game. Nobody means it obviously but people on both sides are saying it to each other all week.”
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