Agony of defeat will spur Armagh on says Kelly Mallon
Captain believes Armagh can build again
ARMAGH captain Kelly Mallon was the picture of raw hurt on Saturday evening after her side fell to Dublin by five points in the All-ireland semi-final.
As a measure of how far they have come in a short space of time, they look like a team that have the potential to grow further after they appeared in parts like they might stop Dublin reaching a seventh consecutive final.
“I am absolutely devastated for the girls,” said the Armagh Harps player, who also captains Madden’s camogie team.
“We worked so hard over the last three months and I don’t even know what to say, I am just gutted.”
The hammer blow for Armagh came in the 39th minute. They conceded a penalty, but also lost full-back Clodagh Mccambridge to the sin-bin for 10 minutes, during which Dublin scored 1-4 to 0-1.
“Especially with the player being Clodagh Mccambridge, such an excellent defender, and we rely on her heavily to hold the middle and shut down,” explained Mallon.
“You could argue we had a penalty, why did they not get yellow carded, I don’t understand what difference is. I am not going to bring it to the referee, but he was not great. There was a time I was threw over the line and I just don’t know what you have to do to get frees.
“Referees are inconsistent in general, but we can’t blame them, bottom line is they did their homework on us and pressed the middle third and they overturned us in the middle and hit us on the breaks.”
This was the first semi-final Armagh had been in for four years and a disappointed as Mallon was, she was able to acknowledge the potential that exists within the set-up.
“I think there is four over 26 on the panel so the rest are relatively young and hopefully if injuries stay away, we will be back with the same set-up and we will be thriving to go away,” he said.
“I suppose we are still privileged to be even playing football at this stage, the situation at the moment. But we are able to compete at this level and we showed that against Mayo, Cork and Dublin, all the good teams in the past. Last year even beating Cork, so we know that we are good enough to compete at that level, we just need to fine tune those finer things. Other teams are cuter, even cynical fouling and stuff like that.
“It is an honour to be at this stage of the competition but just gutted not to have gotten over the line.”
An encouraging sign for the ladies’ game is the calibre of manager that is taking the top inter county teams. Dublin have a serious amount of stability with Mick Bohan, who has coached the senior men’s county team as well as the likes of Clare footballers.
Armagh themselves appointed the renowned Ronan Murphy and Tommy Stevenson at the start of the year and, to judge by their reactions, they had poured a serious amount of work into this team since.
“I s uppose we have r un through a lot of managers and we maybe need a wee bit of continuity with the whole thing to build something and I know it takes a couple of years to get that,” said Mallon.
“Tommy is very positive and believes in us 100 percent and Ronan is brilliant too and then with Ruairi Grimes in doing fitness, we are in good shape and we are playing really attractive football and it would be really nice to get that continuity going into next year.”
Armagh can give themselves credit and draw on the character it took to come back from some early setbacks. They conceded a goal in the third minute and after nine minutes were 2-2 to 0-1 behind.
“I suppose they got off to a better start, but we did come back at them and it was all square at half-time and I thought we could come out in the second-half and put it off to them,” said Mallon.
‘We are good enough, we just need to fine tune’