Mackin happy for Armagh improvement since league final collapse

By Michael McMullan

ARMAGH Ladies won their fifth Ulster title in six seasons on Saturday but Blaithin Mackin said it hasn’t always been rosy in the garden.

She recalls the earlier years of her career when the Orchard County were on the other side of results and Donegal were top of the pops in Ulster.

Two first half goals from Aoife McCoy put Armagh on their way to victory and Mackin was glad with how they “controlled” the decider.

“We were getting to finals and losing them, so it’s great to get that consistency in the group and breed those younger players through,” Mackin said after Saturday’s game.

“We’re very lucky with the young girls that have come through in the past few years. Grace Ferguson and Emily Druse, massive players for us now and really coming into their roles. That’s what we’ve been working on this past five years and hopefully it keeps on building.”

As well as consistency, another key ingredient has been getting young girls’ exposure to playing Division One football.

“That’s probably what we were lacking,” Mackin said. “We got stuck in Division Two for a few years.

“Then, when it came to the Senior Championship, it’s at a completely different level. We’ve now got back up to Division one and been in two Division One finals in two years.

“That sort of consistency in league performance and getting up to the top table again has helped our performances in championship.”

On Saturday’s win over Donegal, Mackin pointed to their opponents’ packed defence and the importance of patience. Once Aoife McCoy bagged the first of her two goals, it gave Armagh the confidence to go on the front foot.

“Once we got ahead, we were very controlled,” Mackin said, stressing the importance of seeing out the game and paying tribute to their defence.

It was an improvement on their previous outing, a 4-14 to 0-11 league final defeat at the hands of Kerry four weeks earlier.

“I don’t think you completely get over performances like that,” she said. “It definitely gave us a bit of a fire in our belly that we know we can’t lower our standards the way we lowered them that day.

“We were just more disappointed in ourselves than anything else. We felt we didn’t turn up; we didn’t have the right energy levels; we didn’t bring a strong enough performance.

“We probably dropped the heads really, really quick. We didn’t want to do that today and I think that showed.

“There were a couple of dropped shorts, a couple of bad shots, a couple of bad misses. We didn’t lower our level. We didn’t retreat into our shells which we probably did do in the league final.

“The hurt from that game probably still holds on and will hold on till the end of the year but hopefully it gives us the fire more than anything.”

Looking forward to the All-Ireland series, there is desire to better last summer’s semi-final defeat.

“Again, the performance in the semi-final last year wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” Mackin concluded.

“We’ll hopefully learn from that and bring the momentum from this win into the group games and we’ll just go game by game.

“We’ll probably know who we have in the first group game in the next few weeks and we’ll build towards that and yeah we’ll be really excited for it and this will give us a good lift.”

Check out this week’s review pod as we look at both of Saturday’s Ulster finals from Clones.