Kieran McGeeney: Armagh and Donegal will have learned a lot after that

Kieran McGeeney felt that Sunday's tussle with Donegal will have given both sides a little more insight as to just where they’re at. 

With the Box-It Athletic Grounds like a cauldron, it was as good a simulation as Jim McGuinness and his side will get in the league’s second tier before they go to Derry and Celtic Park in the Ulster SFC. 

A tight parameter, a combative element to matters inside and outside the white line and provincial foes that simply don’t like each other; McGuinness couldn’t have packed better ingredients if he’d tried. 

And it’s the video that McGeeney will no doubt trawl over most between now and the start of the real business for the Orchard men away to Fermanagh in championship. 

“It was more tactical with not a lot of football but, listen, there were times I would have taken the point and times I was crying we didn’t get the three points,” said the Orchard boss. “It was a good game, it was nip and tuck, and I suppose both teams learned a lot about themselves.”

 Both sides regrouped en masse whenever the other was in possession and it left it so clogged, almost impossible really for either side to target their inside men. 

In a stifled first period, Armagh did have some joy going direct when Andrew Murnin got in behind to goal. But it wasn’t as if that breakthrough was well crafted, instead, Donegal will mark it down as an individual or collective error as the visiting defence carelessly lost the flight of the ball. 

And McGeeney, in a pragmatic moment, explained that sides simply can’t afford to force matters even if it means the spectacle suffers as a result.   

“We kept kicking the bloody thing away. Everybody is mad for you to kick the ball in four on ones. Listening to a couple of people last night telling us that the game’s not fair anymore because corner-forwards have to chase corner-backs and work. 

“With the skill levels nowadays, lads like Oisin Gallen and Paddy McBrearty in one-on-ones will cream you. That’s just the way the game has gone. 

“Sometimes it turns into a tactical battle, like Tyrone and Mayo last night, then you get a wee bit of momentum and you get going and both teams today were stuttering and starting and we went well for a bit and then Donegal at the end of the first half and start of the second.

“It’s only when we watch it again that we will find out all the things we did right and all the things we did wrong”.