Derry and Armagh seeking victory to ignite season

The meandering nature of our football competitions mean the season is much more of a marathon than a sprint now.

The ability of teams to reach that special peak where psychological 'hunger' is met with physical preparation and tactical surety to produce their very best is not an endless reserve. You have maybe two to three of those moments in a year. Use them up and you become a punch drunk fighter whose arms and legs are gone when you need them the most.

Even professional teams in other sports cannot play endlessly at their peak. Man City or the All Blacks achieved their amazing records not by being at their peak all the time. Rather, their consistently excellent ‘normal’ level of performance still crucially left room to push their own bar higher again on those few occasions in a season when they knew things were really on the line.

Those games where, as players, you have a nervous energy in you all week and where there is a buzz and tension in the camp. Dublin’s superb team were a great example of this and their current crop is ominously heading in a similar direction.

And it is this most challenging of conundrums that is facing Mickey Harte and in a slightly different manner Kieran McGeeney. Both men have teams of accomplished players and built panels of sound depth, albeit a depth that Derry stretched to breaking point the last day out.

To push their teams to the level they are currently at, top eight teams in the country, takes a massive effort for the respective counties. For Kerry and Dublin to do the same, simply put, takes less.

Derry pushed hard for the national league, ending up winning it. That was their fifth year in a row of pushing hard to rise from Division 4. Just because we have got used to their standing