TOMÁS Ó SÉ
They will put it up to Dublin but there’s too many ‘ifs’ surrounding Tyrone’s chances
BEFORE the 2008 All-Ireland final, Jack O’Connor sent me a ‘good luck’ text, expressing confidence in our chances of laying the Tyrone ghost to rest.
The world and its mother had had plenty to say about Kerry’s inability to deal with Tyrone’s ferocity. They’d beaten us in ’03 (under Páidí) and ’05 (under Jack) and, I suppose, there was a view that they’d maybe got inside our heads. Anyway, Jack’s text to me ran along the lines of, ‘We’ll bate them this time, because balls inside will stick!’
It’s what I believed myself too, because all the talk was of our ‘Twin Towers’, Kieran Donaghy and Tommy Walsh, wreaking absolute havoc on full-back lines that year. We were full sure we’d win that final in the air. But what does Mickey Harte do?
Pulls Joe and Justin McMahon back to do man-marking jobs on the two boys and the rest, I suppose, is history.
The McMahon brothers didn’t much care if they touched the ball so long as ‘Star’ and young Tommy weren’t touching it either. They absolutely dogged them. It was a complete curve-ball we hadn’t envisaged and, for me, a reminder that Harte almost always has a plan.
Typical
We’ve seen it this year with his use of Pádraig Hampsey, ostensibly a midfielder, but reinvented as a man-marker. This is typical Harte, the kind of left-field improvisation few other managers are willing to take a gamble on. I mean imagine
Kerry putting David
Moran in to full-back. It wouldn’t happen.
The more I think about Tyrone, the more I find myself admiring them. Because sometimes I get the impression that 31 counties want to see them beaten. They’re not exactly popular and I’ve never really understood that. I mean I have as much reason to hate Tyrone as anybody, given their history with that Kerry team I played on.
And, believe me, I did hate them.
But I think it’s easier to hate Tyrone when you don’t actually know them. Sometimes in the past, I suspect it just didn’t sit well with certain people that they refused to conform to the traditional concept of a football superpower. Tyrone didn’t give two figs for history. Their attitude was that they’d make their own.
I think that attitude became interpreted as arrogance. To me, their approach wasn’t disrespectful, it was a refusal to defer. After all, what should the likes of Kerry or Dublin stand for in their eyes other than teams to be beaten?
And maybe we got a bit of hump about that lack of deference. We saw them as the upstarts that Jack depicted in his book. The “nouveau riche” as he called them. Now I will say that certain Tyrone supporters have an arrogance that can be easy to dislike. I’ve had scurrilous things said to me by some, stuff that doesn’t bear repeating. But there are fans in every county (Kerry included) that will let you down.
True, maybe there’s a collective chip on the shoulder in Tyrone. But I actually love what they stand for.
I was reading an interview recently with Philip Jordan and Kevin Hughes, referencing the craic they used have in their so-called ‘Monday Club’ and even ‘Tuesday Club’.
That interested me because I got to know some of them on the International Rules tour in ’05 and I suppose it’s the old story of discovering you’d demonised certain people in your head when it suited you to do so. Because of all the different counties represented on that trip to Australia, I can honestly say I enjoyed the Tyrone lads the
most. I mean you could see a really serious guy like Brian Dooher still clearly embracing the fun that the Brian McGuigans, the Jordans, the ‘Mugsy’ Mulligans and ‘Ricey’ McMenamins were into. And I don’t think Tyrone would have been nearly as successful if they hadn’t been able to strike that balance.
Enda McGinley was talking about this last week. The Mickey Harte factor. And it struck me that, if Harte was the ruthless disciplinarian some would have us believe, Tyrone’s race would have been run a long time ago. It would have been too joyless. But Mickey, clearly, listens to his players. He allows them certain leeway. He’s far too smart to try flying solo here.
You know, players don’t have to be a mir- ror-image of their manager. If anything, it’s unhealthy if they even try. There has to be a balance between work and letting off steam.
One thing I can say categorically is that those players were completely indifferent to history. I now realise that they absolutely believed they’d beat us every time we played. And that hard edge maybe got up people’s noses. Certainly some of the ‘sledging’ did.
Me? I had no problem with either to be honest.
I will admit to roaring like a bull in the dressing-room at half-time in the ’05 final after that incident between Colm Cooper and Pascal McConnell that left ‘Gooch’ with a damaged eye. Darragh and I were fit to be tied inside.
“Where was the f**king back-up?” we kept asking. All I could think was, if we’d done something like that to, say, Canavan, there’d have been half a dozen of them in on top of the culprit to exact retribution.
So, of course, we hated them at the time. But now? Now, if I’m brutally honest, I find myself wishing sometimes for Kerry to have that kind of hard edge. But we don’t. And I’m just not sure it’s something you can manufacture.
Like this year’s Tyrone team doesn’t have the really strong personalities of that ’08 side. That said, they should have been gone from this championship in Navan last June and, yet, they’re still here with us. They’ve grown before our eyes since that escape against Meath as, I suppose, most good teams tend to do.
Master
If you get a bit of luck early doors, you take advantage of it. And Harte is an absolute master of that art.
When we played them in the ’03 semi-final, they brought a ferocity to the field we’d never experienced before. Anything that moved that day, they tackled. Tyrone just didn’t allow us play, bringing an energy and pace to the game that, if I’m honest, took us completely off guard.
Harte always finds something. But, back then, they always seemed to have an added emotional dimension too.
Tyrone’s tragedies have been well documented. Paul McGirr’s death in ’97; Cormac McAnallen’s in ’04. Kevin Hughes’s brother being killed in a car accident. John Devine’s father dying the night before the ’08 final. Like long before Mickey suffered the awful personal tragedy of losing his daughter, Michaela, Tyrone always seemed to have a specific emotional edge. Something hugely personal driving them on.
That Tyrone team of ’03-’08 was the best I ever played against. They had genuinely great players in Canavan, ‘Mugsy’, O’Neill, McGuigan and Seán Cavanagh. Then they had ruthless back men in Conor Gormley, ‘Ricey’ and Jordan. Mix all that up with the work-rate and leadership of a man like Dooher, plus the tactical smarts of Harte and you had a fairly compelling force.
And Harte’s intelligence is still shining through.
The way Tyrone pushed up on Monaghan the last day just reiterated for me how clever he is as a tactician. I accept he has a name for being stubborn, but it’s not stubbornness for the sake of it. He’s not afraid to change when he sees the need.
So have no doubt, he’ll have something up his sleeve for Dublin now. I keep hearing people describe this Tyrone team as ‘ultra-defensive’, but Richie Donnelly and Conor McAliskey have been left inside constantly this year.
Tyrone actually go man-on-man at the back with Colm Cavanagh operating as sweeper. So they’re not over-loading needlessly at the back and that’s one of the distinctions I would see in them from how they played last year.
Twelve months ago, that ‘ultra-defensive’ tag might have been merited. But not now. Is that Stephen O’Neill’s influence? I honestly don’t know. Bottom line, anything they’re doing has to have Harte’s imprima- tur. So this shows how open he is to change.
Trouble is, this is Dublin. This is a tactical Everest to be crossed.
And, right now, I’m just not sure there’s a team in Ireland equipped to do that. Like when I try to imagine this becoming a truly compelling contest, my head is a blizzard of ‘ifs’. Like if they keep Ciarán Kilkenny quiet; if they stop Jack McCaffrey’s runs; if they get a grip on James McCarthy; if they unsettle Dean Rock and Paul Mannion; if they counter-attack at pace; if they defend incredibly well; if they take all their chances... well you can see where this is heading.
I’m trying to mount an argument which, if I’m honest, I don’t really believe in. There are simply too many ifs for Tyrone. You end up not so much making an argument as peddling pie in the sky.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for Tyrone to win. Of course it isn’t.
As far as I can see, Harte’s view is that the modern game calls for exceptional athletes first, outstanding footballers second. And while it mightn’t be fashionable to say so, I think he’s 100 per cent right.
Because it’s through their athleticism that Tyrone will ask questions of Dublin that Galway weren’t able to in the semi-final. Like Galway didn’t have the likes of Ronan McNamee or Tiernan McCann or Frank Burns or Peter Harte bombing up from the back. They just don’t have that calibre of runner. Mickey Harte does and he understands their value.
Trouble is he knows, too, he simply doesn’t have access today to the likes of a Canavan, O’Neill, McGuigan or Dooher in attack.
And that’s where this gets tricky for Tyrone. Striking the right balance between athleticism and football. If they went with pure footballers, Dublin would eat them for breakfast. If they just overdosed on athleticism? Same outcome.
So Tyrone have to put their trust in Harte’s capacity to mix it here.
You know, I was tickled by Jose Mourinho stomping out of his press conference last Monday night, reminding the journalists present that he’d won more Premier Leagues than every other manager in the division put together. Well, Harte must be tempted to do something similar when confronted by his critics (and there are many) in Tyrone.
I mean ask yourself this: Where were they before he took over the seniors?
You can talk about underage success all you like, but the whole country is full of fellas earmarked for greatness who never kicked on to any senior success. Tyrone have won three All-Irelands in their history, Harte manager for all three. Yet, there are people in the county who want rid of him. I find that mind-boggling.
What was their success for the first 119 years of the GAA?
Look, I’d sometimes be pulling my hair out watching how his teams play, but – bottom line – Mickey Harte has them back in another All-Ireland final. Maybe they had a bit of luck on their side against Monaghan, but Tyrone always seem to have the capacity to exploit that kind of luck.
Trouble is, I suspect they’ll need more than luck to get them over the line here.
The goalies will have a major say and I happen to believe that Stephen Cluxton is better under pressure than Niall Morgan. There will be maybe eight or nine Tyrone kick-outs that will be up for grabs and they’re the ones that Morgan simply has to make stick. Can he do that? Not convinced.
I felt Dublin went after Ruairi Lavelle in the second half of their semi-final and, once they did, they just took complete control of the game.
One of the fundamental issues here is teams simply not believing that they can beat the Dubs. I’d put Galway in that category. There’s a fear factor out there now and maybe Tyrone’s biggest challenge is trying to overcome that.
Dublin’s conversion rate against Galway was 78 per cent. That’s phenomenal when last year’s average was 55 per cent. Tyrone’s conversion rate against Monaghan was 47 per cent. Of Tyrone’s 30 shots in that game, ten went wide and six dropped short. Those figures simply will not get them home, or anywhere close to it, tomorrow.
Realistic
They’re going to have turn five of those wides and maybe three of those shots that dropped short into scores. And they’re going to have to do it against a better opposition. Is that realistic? Hard to see it.
We can take their work-rate for granted but, crucially, we can take Dublin’s too. Just watch the road-blocks Tyrone encounter trying to run the ball out of defence. We got glimpses of it in Omagh on a day I sensed Dublin could have won by seven or eight points if they had to. Sludden, Donnelly and Harte were all nullified that day.
John Small ripped into Peter Harte. Eoin Murchan did a big job on Sludden. Mattie Donnelly was invisible. Colm Cavanagh got taken off. Agreed, they’ve all improved since, but this is a different challenge to anything Donegal or Monaghan might have thrown at them in the interim.
Bottom line, Dublin’s forwards work harder than any other forward line in the country. That’s some compliment to pay a team that’s been unbeaten in championship for four years. And it comes down to a simple word: humility.
I saw a lovely video of the Dubs making a presentation to the great Anton O’Toole recently. In Kerry, someone like O’Toole would be revered, a man who nearly gave Ger Power nosebleeds with his running. And I know he’s had a tough year healthwise, so it was nice to see the current team acknowledge one of their greatest predecessors.
That was a touch of class and I think we’ll see more of it tomorrow.
Because Dublin just have too much quality in terms of ability and attitude for me to make any serious case for an upset. The best team I’ve seen – albeit one that Tyrone of the noughties would have given a run for their money – will be four-in-a-row champions by tea-time.
Dublin are the best team I’ve seen - albeit one that Tyrone of the noughties would have give a run for their money - and they will be four-in-a-row champions by tea-time tomorrow