Kieran McGeeney’s side need to turn the tables on their hosts in Saturday’s make-or-break clash in KillarneyWhen Kerry host Armagh in Killarney on Saturday, winning kickouts is likely to be key to winning the game. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho Sat Jun 20 2026 - 06:00 • 6 MIN READWhen it fell, the whole thing pancaked in on itself. In last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final Armagh were defending champions and they were cruising. They had just kicked four points in two minutes, leaving them five up on Kerry with half an hour to go. Nobody had an inkling what was coming next.The numbers from that day have been well-aired but they’re worth laying out for context. Rian O’Neill put Armagh 1-16 to 0-14 up in the 40th minute with a smart point into the Hill. The next Armagh score didn’t arrive until O’Neill converted a 45 with 55 minutes on the clock, by which time Kerry had doubled their score to 0-28. A quarter of an hour in which the All-Ireland champions were outscored 0-14 to 0-0.It was the day of the kickout demolition. In that 15-minute spell, Ethan Rafferty kicked the ball out 11 times. Kerry won nine of them and each possession led to a shot. One dropped short, one ended in a two-pointer for David Clifford and the other seven all led to Kerry white flags. Nine lost kickouts, nine points conceded. The other five came from either turnovers or Kerry kickouts. Total annihilation.“It was just the 15-minute period where Kerry were devastating and we couldn’t get our hands on the ball,” said Kieran McGeeney afterwards. “It’s a 15 minutes you’d like to forget. It happens in sport. We’ve done it ourselves to other teams. You just have to take it on the chin and move on.”When you lose in such a brazen and identifiable way, one of two things can happen. Either you write it off as an anomaly, the kind of thing that can happen to anyone on a given day, or you make it your business to never allow it to happen again. However breezy McGeeney might have been about it on the day, Armagh’s winter was always going to be about finding a way through Door Number Two.Armagh's Rian O'Neill with Jason Foley and Gavin White of Kerry during last year's All-Ireland quarter-final in Croke Park. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho For the vast majority of the league, that’s exactly what they did. Though results didn’t always go their way, Armagh’s biggest margin of defeat during the spring campaign was the four points Donegal had over them in February. They finished a point above relegation but even if they’d taken the drop, it was obvious to all that they were one of the elite teams.A major part of that reputation was earned by the fact almost no team was able build up a head of steam against them. In their first six matches of the 2026 league, Armagh didn’t once concede more than three scores in a row. The heaviest shelling they took in those games was 2-1 scored by Roscommon in the opening two minutes of their game in the Hyde. Both the goals in that short burst came from butchered short kickouts by Blaine Hughes that ended up in Rossie paws.That was the day McGeeney used his postmatch press huddle to roll out his now-famous take on the kickout battle under the new rules. “It’s that 50-50 game that everybody wants,” he said. “There’s no skill in it – it’s just pure piggery. Get in and get it. That’s just what it turns into.”[ Darragh Ó Sé: Don’t be fooled - there’s more to winning kickouts than pure piggeryOpens in new window ]Would he have been so colourful had Armagh got through the day with Hughes’s kickout intact? Maybe, maybe not. But it does give a sense of where the Armagh manager’s head is at. His team do so much that is drilled and professional and controlled. But all it took was two errant kicks of the ball in the space of 40 seconds in that Roscommon game and they were way down in the hole.On the whole though, Armagh largely went through the league unscathed when it came to teams getting a run on them. Mayo kicked three two-pointers in a row against them in Castlebar, Donegal scored four points from three kicks against them in the Athletic Grounds. But they were always able to stop the bleeding before giving up a fourth consecutive score.But then they welcomed Kerry to Armagh. This renewal of acquaintances happened in the final round of league games and suddenly, out of nowhere, it was as if Armagh were spooked. Mark O’Shea won the throw-in and for the next seven minutes, the only Armagh player to get hands on the ball was Hughes as he went to retrieve shot after Kerry shot. Armagh's Ben Crealey with Mark O’Shea and Seán O’Brien of Kerry during March's league clash between the sides. Photograph: Tom O’Hanlon/Inpho Kerry utterly scoured his restarts in the opening period of that game. They won nine of his first 12 kickouts and parlayed them into a 0-10 to 0-0 lead by the 20th minute. It was the All-Ireland quarter-final all over again – only this time, the nine scores in a row were met by increasingly mortified silence from the home crowd in the Athletic Grounds. When David Clifford landed a two-point free from the sideline to put Kerry 10 up, you could nearly hear the grass grow.Watching back those first 20 minutes, the most notable feature of Kerry’s strategy against Armagh’s kickouts is its simplicity. They push four players up around the arc as soon as the ball goes dead, offering nothing short and nothing quick. Then four more across the 65 and two on halfway. Aggressive and relentless.Armagh couldn’t handle it for those first 20 minutes in March. To their immense credit, the way they got out of it was to turn the tables. They finally got up the pitch thanks to a free going their way in the midfield scrum and Cian McConville raised their first white flag in the 24th minute. From there until the end of the half, Kerry were the biter bit. Armagh pulverised Shane Murphy’s kickout, winning eight of the next 10. They hauled Kerry back, so much so that a margin that had looked to be entirely beyond their reach was down to two by half-time. The day ended in a draw, both sides heading back to their corner with a better sense of what the challenge will look like down the line.Conceding nine scores in a row was by far the biggest wave to drench Armagh all year. The only upside was they came in the opening skirmishes of the game. They had time to come back, in a way that hadn’t been available to them the previous July. The question since then has been how to deal with the deluge if one arrived in the championship.For the most part, it hasn’t. Against Tyrone in April, they conceded three consecutive scores in extra-time, two of them two-pointers. Against Fermanagh, they coughed up three two-pointers in the space of five minutes in the second half but the game was long dead by then. They never allowed Down to raise any sort of gallop in the Ulster semi-final, with Hughes retaining a stunning 21 out of 22 kickouts.Apart from that Kerry game in the league, there has only been one time all year when they conceded more than three scores on the spin. That came in the harum-scarum patch in the Ulster final, when Monaghan racked up five scores in a row, including two-pointers for Jack McCarron and Stephen O’Hanlon. In the space of just four minutes, Armagh saw a seven-point lead get washed away in the rain. Normal service has mostly resumed since then. They coughed up three in a row against Derry when Jason Duffy was off with a black card but nothing more serious than that. Against Louth last Sunday, there was a three-in-a-row (including a Sam Mulroy two-pointer) early in the first half and another just short of the half-hour mark. But on the whole, Armagh haven’t been getting penned in on their kickout too often. If anything, it’s been the other way around.That’s the test this weekend in Killarney. Kerry’s press is ferocious and their height around the middle is unyielding. Looking out at Mark O’Shea, the two O’Connors and Sean O’Brien must feel like kicking into midtown Manhattan. Whoever is putting the ball on the tee for Armagh has to find a way to survive. Anything less and their year will surely be done.IN THIS SECTION