Kieran McGeeney and the quarter-final Rubik's Cube

Armagh and the All-Ireland quarter-final – a Rubik's cube that Kieran McGeeney has been unable to solve in his 10 seasons involved with the team.

Red side heartbreak, blue side drama, green side comedy hammering – if you’re a Tyrone fan anyway – you get the picture.

Having won three All-Ireland quarter-finals from five as captain of the Orchard County, McGeeney enters Saturday’s Croke Park showdown with Monaghan hoping to improve on the 0 from 3 record since agreeing to join the management team in 2014, first as head coach under Paul Grimley and then as manager the following season.

It's fair to say that it's one of the biggest days of his pretty special sporting career.

McGeeney’s relationship with Armagh’s fanatical support is a peculiar one. If that quarter-final losing run stretches to four against Vinny Corey’s side, his future will really be under the microscope. It already is for some.

The most famous player to ever don the jersey, the first from the county to lift Sam Maguire and generally accepted as the face of Joe Kernan’s history-making 2002 side. Yet, a large swathe of the support just aren’t jiving with him right now.

"Sure yon’s won nothing in a decade" they protest.

Eh, do Division 3 titles in 2015 and '18 not count, this writer walking rather than boating through a flooded Venice to find a bar showing the latter? And who of us could ever forget the O’Fiaich Cup final of December 2016 when Tyrone were cruelly put to the sword and sent back over the Blackwater with faces reddened.

Armagh used two goalkeepers that day, Patrick Morrison and Mattie McNeice, but it was a future one who stole the show with Ethan Rafferty helping himself to 2-03 just a stone's throw from the aptly named O’Fiaich Square in Crossmaglen.

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