Red Hands tremble with fear when Sam is within their reach
McNamee says Tyrone are not a million miles away, but...
WHAT sticks with Ronan McNamee is the deathly silence. They arrived in Croke Park last year with the football world at their feet, surfing on the back of a 19-game unbeaten run with their trophy cupboard creaking.
The McKenna Cup, Division 2 Allianz League title and the Anglo Celt Cup all safely locked away and on the easier side of the All-Ireland series draw, they looked primed for at least a place in the final. And then, like that, it was gone. ‘It was probably the quietest changing room I have ever been in,’ McNamee recalls of that defeat to Mayo.
‘Everyone was massively disappointed. We had gone all that year without losing, 19 games and then to get there…
‘It’s knock-out football, one slip-up, one poor performance and your season is over,’ reflects the Tyrone full-back ahead of today’s quarter-final clash with neighbours Armagh.
It is a reality that has visited Tyrone more than they would have wished.
Of football’s big four, they have, by a distance, the poorest record at the last stage, with a 50 per cent strike rate when turning quarter-final appearances into a last four place in recent years.
In contrast, prior to today’s clash with Monaghan, Dublin have made it to the last four in 10 out of 15 appearances (a strike-rate 67 per cent), Mayo, ahead of this Monday’s replay against Roscommanagh, mon, have made it eight times out of 11 (73 per cent), while Kerry have managed it 15 times out of 17, a ridiculous 88 per cent conversion rate.
Tyrone’s vulnerability appears to be at its most pronounced when they enter the last-eight round as Ulster champions, losing four of their six quarter-finals when wearing the crown.
Apart from his opening season in 2003, when they demolished Ferthe only other time that Mickey Harte has managed to back up an Ulster win was in 2009 when they defeated Kildare.
Tyrone’s difficulties in the last eight when they are provincial champions may be used as evidence of just how much winning the Ulster championship can take out of a team.
But Donegal poked their finger in the eye of that argument when backing up each of their three Ulster triumphs this decade by going on to reach at least the AllIreland semi-final.
It is difficult to identify the reason why Tyrone keep slipping up in the quarter-finals, although fortune hardly favoured them last year against Mayo, when they played out the final quarter with 14 men after Seán Cavanagh was sent off.
Even then, it was their anxiety rather than his absence which ultimately cost them.
‘We had plenty of chances,’ reflects McNamee.
‘In the last five or six minutes we had six shots and after Cavanagh was sent off we had, I think, seven attacks, seven shots and none of them went over from reasonable shooting angles, so it obviously wasn’t meant to be.
‘I’m sure if it was meant to be it would have happened. But you have to get it out of your head. You can’t be hung up on things like that either. You just put it to the side and use it as motivation.’
Harte’s modest quarter-final record has done little to dilute the belief that his players have in him as a leader.
In fact, it is his ‘calmness’ that reassures them that as long as they keep getting this far, the door will inevitably open.
The revelation that, at Harte’s request, the players say a decade of the rosary before each game is not their only expression of faith in him.
‘It’s just the way he conducts himself. What he has come through. The whole family is the same whether it is Michael, Mark, Matthew you are talking about, they are all the same, just really nice people.
‘Mickey brings a calmness to the thing when people might be on edge at times. He is competitive and wants to win too.
‘The knowledge he has on things, on life in general. Like, I don’t know what he was like 10 years ago, but the way he approaches things now, nothing is ever scripted.’
The sense is that this is a team on the brink of something special. Seán Cavanagh, the only remaining survivor from Harte’s breakthrough team in 2003, has repeatedly claimed this squad is superior than the one that took them to that first All-Ireland.
‘You wouldn’t be getting ahead of yourself and thinking it is your right to win an All-Ireland, you are going to have to work for it. He sees it as everyone else sees it, that the potential is there,’ McNamee adds.
‘I am sure he is not saying it light-heartedly because he was part of some unbelievable Tyrone teams down through the years.
‘There’s definite talent there to be the All-Ireland champions, but whether the results go for you and the ball goes over the bar is another story.
‘I don’t think we are a million miles away but we are just not there yet.’
If they can take that troublesome step today, they will feel a lot closer.
‘We had plenty of chances... but you just have to get it out of your head’