Kieran Shannon: Why has nobody from Ulster been able to retain the All-Ireland?

When Armagh won the All Ireland in 2002 their then manager Joe Kernan not so much ordered a Christmas present as commissioned one.

Although Sam Maguire was spending its initial winter in the county, Kernan was already looking at ways that it could stay the following one as well. It had been 12 years since a football team had put back-to-back All-Irelands together, nine in hurling. There was a tale as well as a trend in that and Kernan wanted to hear it.

He approached his old teammate Jimmy Smyth, then a commentator for the BBC, as well as the indefatigable Marty Morrissey. He wanted them to go interview some of those managers who had got their team over the line but fallen short the following year and explain why for a video he could show his team.

Before Armagh headed off on their team holiday to Mauritius, Morrissey and Smyth had that tape for Kernan. Smyth had been up with Eamon Coleman, Morrissey had met Nicky English, Ger Loughnane and the last football manager to have pulled off the back-to-back, Billy Morgan.

To an extent the exercise worked. In September Armagh became the first defending football champions since Morgan’s Cork in 1990 to make it back to the following year’s final.

Loughnane spoke about fixing the team before it broke. In ’97 he gave Colin Lynch his head but in hindsight should have done so in ’96. Kernan refreshed his starting 15 by infusing Paul Hearty and Andy Mallon into it for 2003.

Stevie McDonnell ended up as the Footballer of the Year. Loughnane had told Morrissey that in the push to win a second All-Ireland, a new wave of leaders would have to emerge.

And yet Armagh still lost that final. Like McDonnell’s shot late on that was blocked by Conor Gormley, they had been denied, fallen short, just like every other Ulster champion since Down in ’61.

That pattern continues. Other counties from other provinces have gone on to repeat – Kerry in 2007, Dublin with the astonishing six-in-a-row – just like multiple counties before them: Galway 64-66, Offaly 71-72, Dublin 76-77, Meath 87-88, Cork 89-90 and most frequently of all, Kerry teams either featuring or coached by Mick O’Dwyer. But no champion from Ulster has manged to retain the belt. Something always trips them up, usually themselves.

After Down won the 1991 All Ireland, the province’s first since the outbreak of the Troubles, the team holiday destination wasn’t as exotic as it would be these days. But the problem wasn’t the choice of Tenerife per se. Instead there were disagreements with the county board over the accommodation, spending money and players’ partners going on the trip.

Ross Carr would subscribe to Loughnane’s theory of needing new leaders to develop and in Down they didn’t. “We had a lot of strong characters in our dressing room in ’91 and ’94,” he’d say in the Sunday Tribune years later. “But the maturity in our younger players didn’t come through.

“Lads got soft. They always had an excuse. After we won the All-Ireland some of them found new girlfriends who suddenly expected to have a say in what wedding their partner could go to and what night he could take off training. They should have been told to back off.

“If I had to do it again, a few of us would have got together and told those players, ‘Look, you do what you want, but you’re not on this panel.’ Because deep down it comes down to looking at yourself in the mirror and asking yourself one question: Do I still have the balls for it?” 

In 1993 Donegal did; they just hadn’t the body or legs to deny a Derry team set on avenging the Ulster final defeat of the previous year. In hindsight reaching the league final, where they were beaten in a replay by a Dublin team similarly wanting to atone for ’92, wasn’t what a veteran group needed heading into as attritional a provincial championship as Ulster was back then.

In ’94 it was Derry’s turn to learn just how unforgiving the competition within the province was; in their opening game of the championship they were knocked out by Down in one of the greatest matches Celtic Park or any provincial ground has witnessed. But there was also a simmering sense that their real opponent or obstacle was internal and that manifested itself spectacularly the following autumn when Mickey Moran succeeded – or some would contend, usurped – Eamonn Coleman as manager.

In the posthumous book The Boys of ’93 completed by his niece and goddaughter Maria McCourt, Coleman wrote about his sense of betrayal. Moran was someone that “I would have trusted with my life.” Fellow selectors Harry Gribben and Dinny McKeever were “my friends”. But they had sided with a county board that felt Coleman was too cosy with the players and in Coleman’s eyes had obviously resented the credit he had got for ’93.

In the same book Coleman’s son Gary, the team’s wing back, would reaffirm the family theory “what it all really came down to and that was getting the glory”. After a training session Gary was asked by the new management team – his father’s old selectors – to stay behind for a word. According to Gary, McKeever put it to him, “Do you think Eamonn Coleman won Derry the All-Ireland?” When Coleman responded that he had “a hell of a lot to do with it” along with Moran being “a good trainer”, Gribben apparently asked what about the rest of them, including himself. “Well, Harry,” Coleman claims to have answered, “you’re only a f****n ball pumper”, triggering the ire of Gribben.

It was a classic case of the Disease of Me, a term coined by the serial NBA winning coach Pat Riley from seeing how teams to various degrees of success bid to retain their championship. Mickey Harte in one of his books even cited one of Riley’s, having seen various symptoms of the virus show in the wake of the county’s maiden All-Ireland breakthrough of 2003. “Inexperience in dealing with sudden success. Chronic feelings of under-appreciation. Paranoia over being cheated out of one’s rightful share.”

Tyrone in 2004 were struck by a thunderbolt that no champion team before or since has had to contend with – the shocking sudden death of their new captain Cormac McAnallen – but through the season he saw other worrying tell-signs.

Paddy Tally had brilliantly trained the team in 2003 but his influence never extended to selecting it: that was exclusively Harte’s domain. In 2004 Harte discovered that Tally was “talking to influential players outside of training sessions about certain team selections”, even questioning the team’s “methods of play”. “The relationship never felt the same,” and that autumn the pair parted ways.

A decade later Donegal had its own version of Coleman-Moran and Harte-Tally in the form of McGuinness-Gallagher. In 2011 and 2012 Jim and Rory had formed the most tactically astute and boldest management tandem in the sport. “But over [2013] I felt our conversations were becoming more fractious,” McGuinness wrote in his autobiography.

He was also baffled by Gallagher publicly commenting that Mayo and Monaghan had been in collusion to both beat Donegal. After both teams had been successful in their respective efforts, McGuinness informed Gallagher that there could be only one number one: “There would be no more lengthy debates or joint decisions.” It’s disputed whether Gallagher was cut or walked but one thing is not: they never spoke again.

There were other internal tensions. McGuinness felt he and his team’s freshness and preparations had been severely compromised by the county board not acceding to his request to again play the county championships after Donegal’s All-Ireland campaign was completed. “When I thought back to the autumn [of 2012], during the celebrations, I began to feel some officials became convinced they were losing their grasp on power. They were beginning to fear Jim McGuinness was running Donegal football.” 

One of the better title defences was Tyrone’s in 2009. Unlike in 2004 when they tragically lost McAnallen and then in 2006 lost a litany of players to injury, the side had everyone back and available, including a rejuvenated Stephen O’Neill. They won Ulster, the first All-Ireland champions to win the following Anglo-Celt since Down in ’61.

Then the day of the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork Seán Cavanagh, the reigning footballer of the year, indicated he was sick. Mickey Harte chose not to start him. Their subsequent accounts in their respective books do not exactly chime, only to hint that they believe the Disease of Me had struck again, with the other party being the one to succumb to it.

All was evidently not right again in the Tyrone camp in 2022, as hinted by seven of the panel of 2021 walking away before or during the season. The fallout was the worst title defence of a county since the advent of the qualifiers.

“A shift takes place when you are All-Ireland champions, no question,” McGuinness wrote in Until Victory Always. “Your world shifts on its axis a little bit.” But that disorientation seems particularly pronounced in Ulster.

While it’s hardly a novelty for the province itself to see Sam Maguire enter its bounds, it can still be and feel very new for the individual county involved. Derry have won it just once. Donegal and Armagh twice. Tyrone have won it four times this century yet still hardly at the rate of a Kerry, Kilkenny, Dublin. When you’ve won as much as those aristocrats have it’s harder to lose the run of yourself.

Armagh would appear to have a manager with a management team too wise in the ways of the world to either fall out or fall for the Disease of Me. You can imagine how much someone who has won as much as Kieran Donaghy and someone as process-driven as Kieran McGeeeney were relishing and planning the challenge of trying to win back to back.

Then Miami happens and a 30-year-old man from the county is arrested on suspicion of committing sexual assault.

Whatever the fallout, a cloud now hangs over the team that will likely stay all year. The innocent climb that Riley spoke about is over.

And with it, you would think, the county’s All-Ireland defence before it even starts. The Ulster self-destruction button appears to have been pressed again.