GALWAY'S STILL MY SAM CALL

THIS time last year we all told you that Armagh wouldn't win an All-Ireland.

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We said it with real conviction too.

Six weeks ago if anyone had asked, "Where are Tyrone?," you'd probably have said, 'It'll take a good team to beat them but ultimately they won't win an All-Ireland.'

I'm not so committed to that viewpoint now though. I've said it before. Tyrone have a lovely balance to their team that complements these new rules.

And while we won't read too much into the result against Donegal last Saturday night, and the perfor mance from either side, what I'd read a lot into is that at the final whistle Darren McCurry just turned to the Donegal sideline, strutted into a swagger and stared them down.

It annoyed me in the extreme and that was the brilliant part of it. I haven't looked on at a Tyrone team and felt that emotion in a few years. They're also coming off the back of a brilliant Under-20 All-Ireland win. After an Armagh All-Ireland last year, I couldn't hack a Tyrone All-Ireland this year.

But I went with Galway at the start of the year so I'm still sticking with them.

Looking around at the football landscape after the first round of the All-Ireland series, three of the provincial winners lost their first game and have probably resigned themselves to the extra game in the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-final.

Take Donegal's case. They'll have played from Ulster's preliminary round — and won back to back provincial titles, which is notoriously difficult to do — but now they've to do the same if they want to win an All-Ireland.

As Jim McGuinness alluded to, Donegal seemed off it on Saturday night.

Louth looked the same against Monaghan and Galway looked a shadow of the side they've shown us so far in their loss to Dublin.

Each of these teams had to dip deep into the reservoirs in their respective provincial finals and each of them were caught by good teams with a few weeks to prepare.