Galway have experience and nous to take prize

People might raise an eyebrow when I say I'm really looking forward to this match, given that the idea of Galway winning an All-Ireland football final is the great nightmare for many Mayo people.

They have visions of us watching through our fingers in the way you might when England are involved in a major tournament final, though there's usually far less reason to be concerned in that particular scenario.

I can't speak for other Mayo folk but I'm at the acceptance stage on this one. The truth of it is that Galway were always eventually going to be there and challenging again. I can rest easy knowing that at least Galway didn't win an All-Ireland on my watch as a player - albeit nor did we.

They were an irrelevance for the first half of my football career when we had them pegged as fancy dans. But they gradually got their house in order and have been knocking really hard on the door in the last couple of years, reaching the final in my last year involved - a game they could easily have won.

Certainly, it's a brilliantly exciting, novel final. Neither of these teams looked like All-Ireland finalists for most of 2024.

Galway were the walking wounded in the spring and had more lads on the treatment table than on the pitch. Entering injury-time in the Connacht semi-final, it looked like they were about to lose to Sligo.

Armagh had great raw material but no real track record in winning big games. There was a sense that they were doomed to be forever nearly men, an idea which was strengthened again after they threw away a winning position in the Ulster final.

Few would have foreseen them knocking out Dublin and then Kerry in Croke Park.

Despite it being a first-time final pairing, there's no shortage of recent evidence of how the pair