TYRONE MAY NOT BE GOOD ENOUGH
HARTE WILL HAVE TO DISPEL ONE DOUBT PLAGUING RECENT FAILINGS...
“He stood accused of being caught behind the tactical curve”
IT IS in keeping with Tyrone’s season that the year is not even over before their new one begins. They head back out on the trail next Thursday night at Celtic Park where they take on Derry in an opening round McKenna Cup match, stepping back into the light for the first time since that All-Ireland final defeat to Dublin.
That the line is blurred between the end of the old season and the beginning of the new one is fitting because their season played as much to a riddle as it did to reason.
After all, they finished the season without a trinket to show and yet it was still deemed to be their most successful in a decade.
In contrast, 12 months ago Mickey Harte sat down to his festive dinner as a back-to-back Ulster champion, but he could have carved the air as easily as the bird, so thick was it with talk of impending crisis.
That is the fickle way of sport, but then a manager heading into his 17th season hardly needs a lecture on how quickly the public mood turns.
But now, after reaching a first final in a decade and proving themselves competitive when they arrived there, the expectation is that they will kick on.
‘It’s good in one way and a challenge in another because that’s the standard we’ve set,’ admitted Harte, speaking at last week’s launch of the McKenna Cup.
‘We got to the final, we didn’t do the business so to speak and that’s our aspiration now — to get back there.
‘If we want to use the experience of last year’s final, you can only use it if you get back to the final.
‘We’re aiming high, but that does not dismiss the fact we have a lot of very difficult steps to take before we get there,’ he said.
That challenge should not be understated.
If there is a worry for Harte, it is that his team managed to tick so many of the boxes they needed over the course of the season, and yet it was still not enough to get the job done.
At the start of this year, the consensus was that they simply did not have the depth of panel to contend for an All-Ireland title. They proved that to be a lie.
Through necessity created by injuries to Mark Bradley and Lee Brennan in the opening round defeat to Monaghan which set them on a nine-match recovery journey to the final, they developed a squad.
Over the Championship, they used 28 players, which is the kind of number you might expect to see over an entire League campaign when teams are in the blooding business — and they did so effectively.
Harte managed to do something few others have over the last four years, gleaning more from his bench than even Jim Gavin.
Tyrone scored 4-22 from the bench, an average of 3.4 points per game, which was marginally more than Dublin’s 3.3 average. But, more significantly, Tyrone’s bench turned matches. Without Harry Loughran’s goal against Meath they might never have got past the first round of the qualifiers. Without Ronan O’Neill’s three points against Cavan, who knows how that threepoint game might have rolled?
Above all, it was their bench which swung their clutch Super 8s match against Donegal, not just in Lee Brennan’s four points but in Kieran McGeary’s thundering final quarter.
The other reason Harte was feeling heat 12 months ago was because of the manner his ultradefensive game-plan had backfired in the semi-final against Dublin. He stood accused of being caught in a time warp, stranded behind the tactical curve and the question was asked if he could come up with a new way.
That was answered, too. Tyrone’s game plan was more aggressive and ambitious this past summer.
That was evident in the big games, not least in the first half of the All-Ireland semi-final win over Monaghan and, in particular, that opening quarter blitz of the champions in the final, which saw them shoot into a 0-5 to 0-1 lead.
‘I think we probably lacked a bit of experience and our decisionmaking and game management just wasn’t good,’ reasoned their two-time All-Star Colm Cavanagh, when quizzed recently over why that start did not morph into a match-winning platform.
Perhaps, but the real worry for Harte and Tyrone is that the bottom-line as to why they came up six points shy — and that deficit was massaged by their late revival — is more obvious and less comforting: they may not be good enough.
The suspicion is that they lack the quality of player that can change a game when it is needed.
They don’t have a controlling force as potent as a Brian Fenton or a Ciaran Kilkenny, or a lightning rod like Jack McCaffrey, or a drop dead gorgeous inside forward like Paul Mannion.
Tyrone have headline talent of their own such as Mattie Donnell, Peter Harte and Niall Sludden but they are a level below what Dublin can send out.
More importantly, the suspicion is that they don’t have the ruthless players that all champions tend to have.
At one of those open night fundraising forums at which Harte guested, one audience member hammered a nail on the head.
‘Do you know what is wrong, Mickey, you have too many grammar boys on that team,’ he announced to peals of laughter.
Thing is, he was right. Tyrone still have a name for being tough to play against, but that has been earned off the back of those who have gone before them.
They don’t have an agitator like John Small, or the type of ruthlessness that saw Jonny Cooper rechristened ‘Sergio Ramos’.
And if you don’t have the quality to seduce or the instinct to sabotage, then where do you find the improvement to make that huge step forward?
The hardest questions still have to be answered.