In early July 2019, a week after Armagh lost by a point to Mayo in round three of the qualifiers, a former Armagh player wrote a letter to the Irish News calling for Kieran McGeeney’s removal as manager. The identity of the letter writer was verified by the paper, though he didn’t want his name published. Instead, he was characterised as a “prominent former Armagh player”. Gutsy.
The shadowy assassin had a scattergun. He accused McGeeney of tactical cock-ups and berated him for not changing his “support staff” and for being “too loyal” to players. “It was only when us supporters were roaring on to the pitch that he reluctantly dropped them,” he wrote.
The accusation that would have cut to the core of McGeeney’s being, though, was that he was hiding behind a tissue of excuses. “The post-match interview to Sky Sports [after the Mayo defeat] was most revealing,” wrote Gutsy. “What grinds me down is the hard luck stories. ‘Oh, the referee was against us, we couldn’t buy a free, etc.’”
From behind his mask, Gutsy pulled the trigger. “Time to be ruthless and make a change at the top,” he wrote. “This team is capable of winning if they are properly guided.”
If there was a constituency of dissent in Armagh, there was no heave against McGeeney at the end of that year. There were bound to be sceptics, though. In his first five seasons as manager, progress had been microscopic. In his first four seasons they had failed to win a game in the Ulster championship.
It was more apparent as time went on, but even in the first half of his Armagh reign McGeeney was not swept up in the usual tides of management. For just about everybody else in that game, time granted and results gained are locked in an interdependent relationship. Forgiveness is the only variable.
On Thursday night, for example, the Mayo county board buried Kevin McStay in a shallow grave after his third season because results had not met their expectations. In McGeeney’s third season as Armagh manager they failed to win promotion from Division Three in the league and lost their opening match in the Ulster championship.
After a charmed run in the qualifiers, they met Tyrone in the All-Ireland quarter-final and lost by a pulverising 18 points. How good were Tyrone? Dublin beat them by 12 points in the semi-final. From the scene of that blast, McGeeney walked away with barely a scratch.
The common thread in McGeeney’s 18 seasons as a manager, though, is that he has never lost a dressingroom. When McGeeney was ousted from the Kildare job in 2013, after delegates voted by 29-28 to make a change, the players fulminated on social media.
“I’ve never been ashamed to be a Kildare footballer, until tonight,” tweeted Eamonn Callaghan, the Kildare captain. “A disgraceful way to treat a man who put so much heart and effort into Kildare football,” said Emmet Bolton. “Brainless fools,” said Alan Smith.
“A black day for Kildare GAA,” said Johnny Doyle at the time. “I’ve never felt as empty.”
“When he came to Kildare, he totally immersed himself within the county,” Doyle says now. “We felt that we were the most important people in his life. Everything he did was to make us better. Challenged us, absolutely. Could be very hard on us at times. But what I liked was the honesty he brought. He got rid of a lot of excuses.”
The only context for McGeeney’s time in Kildare now is hindsight. This weekend is the 21st edition of All-Ireland football quarter-finals. Kildare have contested just six of them; five of them were under McGeeney.
The only quarter-final they won was also under McGeeney and that may have been part of the problem. He created an expectation of success that became the barometer for his performance.
It was like Aston Villa sacking Martin O’Neill in 2010 for finishing sixth in the Premier League for the third season in a row and then waiting 14 years to finish in the top six again. Since McGeeney left the only other quarter-final Kildare have contested was against Kerry; they were annihilated by seven goals and six points.
“Some of the rubbish that went on around the time [of his removal] was crazy,” says Doyle. “That he was bleeding the county dry, and all this bullshit. It was a brilliant part of my life. You were up there competing; you were playing to packed houses in Croke Park.
“Twice we went away on training camps. I had never been away on any of those trips. We raised a few bob and went away. You felt like, ‘We’re up there with Kerry. Why can’t we go on these trips?’ The vast majority of the players wanted Kieran [to stay].”
McGeeney’s capacity for engaging with players is at odds with his public persona. Like Ryan Moore, the champion jockey, McGeeney is suspicious of microphones, or ambivalent at least. The hard-nosed, steely-eyed, granite-jawed image he projects cannot be the whole truth. Players couldn’t become attached to that.
When he worked for a few months in 2014 as a consultant with the Tipperary hurlers, his effect on Séamus Callanan, by the player’s account, was transformative. In Kildare, Callaghan said that he changed his lifestyle and how he thought about football. Nobody can just barge in and make those changes: players must open the door.
Enda McNulty, the former Armagh player and performance coach, has known McGeeney for more than 30 years. “For people that wouldn’t know him, what they wouldn’t recognise in Kieran is that he’s incredibly empathetic,” says McNulty.
After the All-Ireland last year, Charlie Vernon spoke about the togetherness McGeeney fostered in the group over many years. The pursuit of winning couldn’t just be transactional and cold; it depended on feelings.
“He’d refer to guys he played with as being his friends,” said Vernon. “Kieran’s was a Spartan attitude: the closer you were off the pitch, the better you would be together on the pitch. You can’t force these friendships, but he wanted Armagh to be like a club team.”
Aaron Kernan played alongside McGeeney for a few years, and under him for a season when he was Paul Grimley’s assistant in 2014. He didn’t change from one setting to the other.
“Anything he does in life, he’s all-in,” says Kernan. “It’s a bit easier to get that buy-in when you’ve done it yourself as a player. The big thing for him is not everybody is going to like you, but they have to respect you if you’re trying to get success. Creating the environment where the bigger picture is all that matters is very, very hard to do at the best of times. It’s extremely hard to do when you’re not winning.
“For Kieran, mediocrity or substandard stuff just doesn’t come into the equation, but there’s a fine balance with that. There can be a lot of collateral damage on the way to ultimately getting success.”
In McGeeney’s case there have been some mortifying defeats. In his rookie season with Kildare they lost to Wicklow, who had finished 27 places below them in the league; it was the first time that Wicklow had won a championship match in Croke Park. “Clearly, this must rank as one of the great disasters of Kildare football,” wrote Eugene McGee in the Irish Independent.
Two years later Kildare were knocked out of the Leinster championship by Louth, when they were a mid-table team in Division Three. In 2012 Kildare lost an All-Ireland quarter-final to Cork by 13 points. None of those performances tallied with McGeeney’s livid rejection of losing.
In Armagh, the suffering continued. In his second season as manager they were relegated to Division Three, losing by 17 points to Cavan along the way. In the Ulster championship two months later, they lost by eight points to the same opponents. The criticism on The Sunday Game was so vitriolic that the Armagh county board made their displeasure known to RTÉ.
“I have good footballers in there,” said McGeeney after the league beating. “I mustn’t be doing the right thing with them for them to perform like that. I have to change what I’m doing because I don’t think they’re that bad.”
And yet there was never any whiff of mutiny. Players didn’t walk away, or brief against him. They had his back. “There are times you do feel you have let him down,” said Mark Shields in 2019.
The Armagh county board were remarkably patient and loyal, too, but there were other layers to that relationship: keeping McGeeney on board made business sense because fundraising is integral to the service McGeeney provides.
When he took on the Kildare job the county board was a financial basket case, but McGeeney took fundraising for the team off their hands. In 2012, the Kildare county board reported a surplus for the first time in six years, even though team expenses had been €525,000 for that season.
In Armagh, he has provided the same service. By 2019, the county board was “in the black” financially, after years of being in the red. McGeeney’s capacity to run a self-sufficient operation was critical to that change in circumstances.
And yet McGeeney’s survival for so long in the job without any significant success was extraordinary. “I met Arsene Wenger at a workshop 10 years ago,” says McNulty, “and he spoke for half an hour about motivational stamina. He spoke about staying motivated when people are criticising them, challenging them, maybe even sticking a knife in their back. But to stay going. Kieran is the epitome of motivational stamina.”
Wenger had a similar experience at Arsenal in his final years: not winning anything; not sacked. In that case, waiting didn’t work. In Armagh, the waiting nearly reached a bloody end in 2023 when there was a push against him from a rump of disaffected clubs. The county board executive supported McGeeney en bloc and the heave was comprehensively routed, 46-16.
“It was really difficult on Kieran,” says Kernan. “It was hard to accept given everything he had done as a player and as a manager. My father [Joe] won four Ulsters [as manager], an All-Ireland, a National League. But I know by the time he was finishing up there were players on the county team who thought he had overstayed his time.
“I know those conversations happened. It was hurtful for me as his son and for us as a family because of everything my father had given and the success he had brought. But the reality is some people don’t give a shit. They don’t care what you’ve won. They just look narrowly.”
McGeeney was spared that indignity. Armagh won.
