Eamon Mackle, liaison officer and team fixer, was a keen medal collector and included in his haul was a 1934 Armagh county medal won by a Young Irelands side featuring his father, Dan.
One day, he spent a significant amount of money on a batch of six medals, amongst which was a Celtic Cross from Wexford's 1916 All-Ireland triumph.
As the Armagh players sat with their heads bowed in the dressing room, Kernan started the recovery process with a few words. Then he went to his bag of treats and pulled out the plaque he had received for finishing second to Dublin in the 1977 All-Ireland race.
In that moment, it served no purpose other than to remind him he was a loser.
'Do you want one of these?’ he asked, before smashing it into pieces against the wall.
‘Or do you want one of these?’ producing the winning medal that Mackle had snagged at an auction.
Shoulders that had been slumped were soon raised. Eyes looking for the floor started searching out teammates, fists being pumped. ‘We can do this,’ those reassuring glances said.
Kieran McGeeney’s message to his troops was clear. The whole situation wasn’t good enough, but he couldn’t stomach that the Kerry players were sauntering around Croke Park without a glove being laid on them. Paul Grimley reiterated the point – ‘get tight, get tight; let them know they’re in a game.’
While belief was being restored to the Armagh players, the ‘Sunday Game’ studio was having none of it. They got wind of Kernan’s plan with the medals, but they saw no turnaround in sight.
‘I saw Gerry Adams in the crowd there in his orange colours, surprise, surprise, and he could have told the Armagh full-back line, "Your problems haven’t gone away you know,"’ said Colm O’Rourke.
‘I swear to God, my mother would be faster than most of those three fellas and she has a bit of arthritis in the knee,’ said Pat Spillane. It wasn’t the first time the Kerry legend had sniped at the Ulster champions, with the full-back line of the McNulty brothers and Francie Bellew usually the main targets.
In the aftermath of the final, a letter was placed into a post box in Armagh simply marked ‘Pat the bollocks, Kerry.’ It duly arrived at Spillane’s door.
Spillane’s comments resonated, and they upset some of the Armagh players, according to Justin McNulty.
‘It registered with me big time; it made me very angry. It made me very animated and it made me very determined. I thought, "I’ll show that bastard. I’ll show that fucking bastard." That’s what he was to me, talking about amateur sportsmen like that, giving their last breath to be as good as we can be.
‘For him to come out and mock us was wrong, simply wrong. It certainly drove me and Enda on, and I’m sure it drove Francie on too.’
Back down below the Hogan Stand, one last important bit of advice was being dished out. Des Jennings, who looked after the mental side of things along with Hugh Campbell, took Oisín McConville aside and told him to go down and kick the ball over the bar when running back onto the pitch.
McConville didn’t want to do that because he felt the Kerry fans on the Hill would laugh at him, but when Armagh re-entered the field – after keeping Kerry waiting for several minutes – he blasted a ball down the pitch. He immediately felt as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
The Crossmaglen man’s public persona at the time was usually defined in one of two words, depending on how you felt about him – confident or arrogant. He may have appeared to be the last person that mental drills would work on, but he was always open to them, even the extravagant ones created by his former trainer John Morrison.
‘I remember one day with the U21s, John had a table, a chair, a stool, a saucer, a cup and a spoon stacked up, and he told us we were the spoons. For things to happen he was telling us that we had to be the ones to stir the cup.
‘It was a bit of craic. It was a good way to take away the nerves. I don’t know if it was designed around that, but if it was it was brilliant. We played very well that day. I think we might have beaten Tyrone.’
Armagh were notably more physical at the start of the second half. Within a minute, Aidan O’Rourke was booked for laying down a marker on Colm Cooper.
‘It certainly wasn’t pre-ordained, but at half-time, there was a sense that they were getting too much space and getting away from us,’ O’Rourke says of his hit on Cooper.
‘Grimbo had given us a blast about not sticking, not being tight enough and letting them slip a yard off. Geezer reinforced that before we went back out. We were both in the toilet just before we went back out and Geezer said, "We need to get some contact on these boys."
‘That’s as far as it went, but it was in my head that whenever Gooch released a hand pass and was going on for the return, I was following through. It was just a front shoulder. I got a yellow. It’s hard to know if it rattled him, but I hurt him when hitting him.
‘He hadn’t a great second half – I’m not putting it down to that, but it was part of an overall urgency to be more physical and give them less space.’
An extract from Kings for A Day by Niall McCoy, published by The O'Brien Press. In bookshops 3 October, priced €19.99/£17.99
