‘People will always crave change if you’re not winning’

Mickey Harte has had detractors in the last 10 years but he never lost faith in his ability to manage

HERE he is, 10 years on, expressing appreciation for what’s ahead of them in the very place that could well be described as the concrete legacy of his first few years in charge.

Mickey Harte is sitting in the auditorium of Tyrone’s GAA Centre in Garvaghey, built at a cost of around £7m, largely on the back of the wellspring of joy that six All-Ireland titles in a neat 10-year period under his command of various county teams brought.

Ten years of unprecedented success followed by 10 more years of being there or thereabouts but never being quite close enough to replicate those 2003, 2005 and 2008 All-Ireland triumphs.

IMPRESSIVE

There’s been four Ulster titles in between, the same number of All-Ireland semi-finals and three more All-Ireland quarter-finals to reflect an impressive level of consistency prior to this year. Only twice (2012 and 2014) did a campaign stall ahead of that traditional August Bank Holiday weekend cut-off point.

But Tyrone, it seems, no longer trade in the currency of consistency. Harte himself knows that, he hears it, he had sensed it each time the brakes have been applied short of September.

And the inevitable question is asked. Is the game up for him? Is it time for change? The legacy he created in those first five years set a standard that follows him around now.

Any push for change has never amounted to much however and Harte, the “eternal optimist” has always been convinced that he could take them back to this place.

“I understand that some people always crave change if you’re not winning, I’ve seen it and heard it,” he reflected.

“Someone at a meeting decried that it was seven or eight years since Tyrone had reached an All-Ireland final and this was a real problem for them. I began to wonder what we were doing for the 119 years before we won any!

“But there are people with that mentality. That’s fine, they can be as they may, but there are a lot of good people in our county who love Gaelic games and the whole concept of what it has to offer, to themselves and to their family.

“I understand that there’s always an urge to change, the view that ‘new’ will always bring ‘better’. But I still felt over the years that there was something we could offer as a management, and that I could offer as a person to Gaelic games at this level.

“I still believed I could do that and I’m glad that people on the county board who mattered agreed with that assessment.”

The appreciation for this point of the season that they have now reached is deep.

“I have come to learn over the last ten years that this isn’t an easy place to get to. And that it seemed to come maybe too easy to us in those five years when we had three experiences of that nature.

“With general opinion you can get caught up in thinking this can happen very often. But, if we look back through history, we realise that it doesn’t happen very often. It is a real blessing to be in this fourth final.

“Certain results hit you very sorely and you are thinking, ‘Are we ever going to get back to the top table?’ You do ask yourself these questions.

“But I have serious belief in the quality of the players in our county, the systems that prevail and the support that we have on every level.

“There is something about that, about being patient, trusting what you are about, adjusting what needs to be adjusted to try to come up with something better and something different.

“So it is an ongoing process. You learn a lot from setbacks and you learn a lot from hurt.

And maybe it is good to feel the hurt of defeat and know that you are slipping a bit. It drives you on to think outside the box and how to get to a better place.”

On this very day 12 months ago Tyrone left Croke Park a chastened team, Harte depicted as a manager for whom time had caught up. Dublin’s 12-point All-Ireland semi-final win became a real reference point for tactical evolution as Tyrone’s defensive shell was ruthlessly pulled apart.

It’s a day Harte insists they’d like to forget but can’t. Yet the scars have healed

through the satisfaction of putting themselves in this position now to challenge again.

“It didn’t feel particularly good. It’s not a feeling I would recommend to anyone else at any time,” he said. “All I could liken it to was a couple of All-Ireland finals I was at. One of them was Kerry and Mayo, over at half-time. Another one, was it to Cork?

“It makes people think, ‘Why are we here? I know the result. I know the outcome’. It’s a pain actually to watch the second half, even as a spectator. So you can imagine what a pain it is to watch it (while) in charge of the team. “It’s just a day to forget, only we’re not allowed to forget it and we can’t forget it because it will always be there and it will always be a fact of life.”

Harte is loath to attribute it simply to their own inadequacies on the day.

“I don’t want to do disrespect to Dublin by thinking they just beat a team that didn’t perform. Dublin, I believe, played really good football that day which was part of the reason that we appeared so bad. “It was a double-edged sword. They were definitely playing really well, and we were not playing the way we can play. Did one thing cause the other? Who knows? It definitely needs to be looked at – if one team is excelling, the other team will appear to be very poor then. It could be as much to do with Dublin’s excellence as our poor performance.”

But they didn’t dwell on it for long enough to take them down. When they met to review within a week or so, too many targets had been reached for them to despair too much.

“We never believed we were as bad as we appeared that day. Players had performed well over a few years, winning back-to-back Ulster titles, coming through some really difficult games.

“We had a decent run, we stayed in Division 1 in the league for a few years, and that’s not easily done either because you’re talking about 25 per cent of the teams are relegated. That’s a very tough league to be in. So we survived that as well. We had lots of things we were doing well. We couldn’t be thinking that all is lost because of one game.”

Tyrone’s record of qualifier recovery from early-season defeats in Ulster made this year’s rescue effort an easier sell, Harte acknowledges.

“I think it’s a question of ‘change the way you look at things and the way you look at things will change’. That’s really what it’s about. You go for the direct route, you go for winning titles, provincial titles.

“If it doesn’t happen, then you’ve got to rewrite the script. You’ve got to rewrite it with belief. You’ve got to believe that, ‘I don’t mind choosing this way, we can handle this’. So it has to come from a central belief that you deal with where you find yourself.

FORTUNATE

“We’re fortunate now that if you look back over the record of qualifying teams, we’re up there with the best because we’ve been in it so often, we’ve played so many games. So it isn’t as hard a sell to our players now. Sometimes, the hurt of losing in the same season is helpful to guard against losing again.” Harte reminds you that in his three previous All-Ireland finals as manager they have beaten the reigning champions each time at longer odds. So it’s a familiar place for him now. “We understand that place, being underdogs and having to be at your very best to get what you want. Maybe we should be glad of that fact, that we have never really gone into an All-Ireland final as favourites at any time.”

That said, the lack of favouritism is much more pronounced now than it was in 2003, 2005 or 2008.

Twice this year, in league and championship, Dublin have reinforced their supremacy over Harte’s Tyrone, most recently in their All-Ireland quarter-final in Omagh last month.

That loss can provide some crumb of comfort to Tyrone now that Harte isn’t necessarily keen on grasping.

Being able to compete with them is one thing, finding a way to beat them an entirely different matter altogether. Harte now sees the most defensive-savvy team around, a trick lost in the rush to acclaim their attacking instincts.

“If any team learned so much about a semi-final defeat, was it 2014 to Donegal?” he said of Dublin’s shock reversal.

“I think from that day on you saw a different Dublin. Not that it’s always been noted, but they became very defensive and very much aware of the need to be defensive and they do it with great skill.

“Up to that time, I think they did play totally on the front foot. They just took on all comers and said, ‘We’ll beat ye. I don’t care what you’re about, we’ll beat ye’.

“Donegal cracked that myth on them and I think they learned a lot from that myth. Ever since that time, they have that quality to go and kill you with scores. They also are very, very secure at the back, and they have a great system of defending and it is very ordered.”