THE ENDURING MAGIC OF MICKEY HARTE
Tyrone are at a crossroads with their long-serving boss, who must show signs of progress against Dublin today
TO hear it said that Mickey Harte faces a defining afternoon in Croke Park is, on first contact, astonishing.
Thanks to Harte, Tyrone has a tradition of All-Ireland-winning success. It is because of the work of Harte that thousands of Tyrone supporters will snake towards Dublin in candy-striped streams this morning.
No manager, arguably, has had a more pronounced influence on football in the past 50 years.
Unspeakable grief has attended his family and the wider football community within the county.
Through it all, Harte has been a monument to dignity, he has embraced the winning days and endured the heartbreaking ones.
But now, in his 15th season managing the Tyrone senior team, the claim is made that this All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin will determine his legacy.
In the short-term, it might. Longer-term, Harte’s status in Tyrone football was secured with the first Sam Maguire win in 2003, let alone the triumphs of 2005 and 2008.
He is untouchable as a presence in the history of Gaelic football.
But in the here and now, there is much less certainty.
His advocates argue that today is the culmination of three seasons of work for Harte, that meeting the challenge laid down by Dublin to all of football has shaped his work with Tyrone through all that time.
First, he returned Tyrone to the head of Ulster’s footballing tribes, capitalising on the end of the Jim McGuinness era in Donegal to win the provincial Championship last year and retain it this summer. Now, the project has gone national. In the noughties, Harte bested Jack O’Connor and Kerry, and Joe Kernan’s Armagh.
A decade on, Dublin are the standard.
One line resounded in the accounts of Harte’s pre-match pensées shared in the newspapers throughout the week. ‘So yes, there’s been a whole lot of thought around the idea of finishing better, but I can’t say that transformation will just take place in one year, either.’
That was the talk of a man seeing beyond 2017, a manager who understands that great eras do not emerge suddenly on the third Sunday in September.
The difficulty is that Harte’s thinking on the future and that of the county’s clubs did not neatly align when the matter was raised last autumn.
Harte is treated by some in this country as a curiosity, even an embarrassment in modern Ireland life.
He has a strong Catholic faith and he talks about it publicly. This exposed the remarkable hypocrisy of some forces in Irish life that champion pluralism as long as any ideas expressed fit with their own.
That Harte had no compunction about sharing the details of his team saying the Rosary together in a national newspaper interview illustrated his faith but was also testament to his singular nature, and this is where his football life synchs with his personal one.
He has always relied on his own principles, and this in a sport where the latest tactical or preparatory fad inspires copycats quickly and enthusiastically.
He has sepnt a decade and a half at the Tryrone senior team helm, but he has been preparing county squads for over a quarter of a century, going back to his involvement with underage teams in the early 1990s.
His agreement with Tyrone officials on managing the team runs out at the end of this season. Last September, Harte proposed a one-year extension that would bring him up to the conclusion of the 2018 campaign.
‘I suggested what I felt was the right thing to do and that wasn’t taken up,’ he said in an interview earlier this year.
‘It was just the whole idea of some continuity in the interests of developing this team. To me, that would have been the right way of doing it but I have to accept the decision.’
The refusal of the Tyrone clubs, contrary to the wishes of the board, to sanction that deal was the first firm public evidence of a change in the nature of support for Harte within the county.
The strength of his position had always been assumed. That is no longer the case.
However, before the Ulster final he shared his belief that this will not be his final season with the county, and another term looks certain, even if they fall against Dublin today.
But the nature of the result will dictate everything. Victory and the emergence of Harte’s third great team can be credibly heralded.
A defeat that shows enough signs of Tyrone living with the standards set by Dublin and maintained by Mayo and Kerry would also contain enough in the way of encouragement.
But were Tyrone to lose in the manner they have to the leading teams in the last half-decade, Harte would inevitably face fresh questions about the abilities of this team, especially in attack. He would also hear some wondering if he is the man to introduce the necessary improvements.
Tyrone have not beaten Dublin, Kerry or Mayo in the Championship since 2008, the year of their last AllIreland title.
They have lost to Donegal in four of six Championship matches in that time but have won their last two summer fixtures against their provincial rivals.
Their difficulties with the leading teams are clear, and the nature of the problem is, too: Tyrone have not been able to score enough on the big days in Croke Park.
They lost by a point to Mayo at the quarter-final stage last season, but kicked 14 wides. A year earlier, Kerry beat them in a semi-final in which Tyrone created six goal-scoring chances but took only one, from a penalty.
The biggest Championship total they have amassed against Dublin, Kerry or Mayo since 2008 is 0-15, against Dublin in 2011. Scoring is their problem against the strongest opposition. That is why for all the encouragement they take from scoring 6-77 in four Championship matches so far this summer, it must be tempered by the abrupt rise in standards they are about to confront.
Harte circled around this truth ahead of today’s match.
‘We had a very good season (last year) up until we met Mayo and we did create many more chances than we converted, so that is something the players have thought long and hard about.
‘We’ve worked very much on people preparing to take on shots, but you can’t just wait until the day of the game to do that. We need this in training every night. We need players who may not normally be shooters finding themselves in positions to take scores.’ That worked brilliantly through Ulster, and when they scored 1-21 in eviscerating Donegal in the teams’ semi-final in June, it confirmed a decisive power-swing in Ulster but also fluidity in Tyrone’s offensive game. But the subsequent collapse of Donegal in the qualifiers, precipitating the departure of Rory Gallagher, must qualify Tyrone’s performance that day. A team’s scoring cannot be analysed in isolation; the nature of the opposition is important, too. Dublin and Kerry saunter through their provinces, but they also consistently tally competitive scores against each other and the rest of the best. Tyrone are yet to do that, and that is why the 6-77 scoring total so far this season cannot be admired in its own right. Down looked a Division 3 team in the second half of the Ulster final as Tyrone raced to a final score of 2-17, and Armagh were similarly poor as they conceded 3-17 to Harte’s unit in the quarter-finals. However, the appetite for ruthlessness in Tyrone’s forays forward this summer cannot be ignored. They are undoubtedly much better in front of the posts, but how much better is to be determined. We will know today. ‘He’s a ruthless man, and I know that first hand,’ said Owen Mulligan of his old coach. ‘He’s totally ruthless.’ That is borne of enormous ambition. Harte has been responsible for Tyrone’s best days. His past is unimpeachable. His future hinges to an important extent on today.