’KEEPER BATTLE PROVIDES A RAY OF LIGHT
Tyrone star Morgan is in golden age for goalkeepers Red Hand stopper must aim to match rival Cluxton
Out-performing the game’s greatest keeper is asking a lot
IT HAS been a poor summer for Gaelic football. The game has struggled to escape the shadow cast by the splendour of the hurling Championship as the Super 8s failed to fire and Mayo’s beautiful chaos made an early exit. Ahead of Sunday, much of the talk is about how the introduction of a shot-clock or handpass restriction would improve the game.
So, football has its problems. But there’s one area of the field in the midst of a golden age. It has been yet another excellent year for goalkeepers, even better than 2017 when two custodians — David Clarke and Stephen Cluxton — were short-listed for Footballer of the Year.
When Cluxton re-imagined the parameters of the position, little did he know there would follow a generation inspired by him. Monaghan’s Rory Beggan, Kildare’s Mark Donnellan, Galway’s Ruairi Lavelle and Donegal’s Shaun Patton have all been superb this season, and all are clones, in one way or another, of the Dublin captain.
However, if Tyrone are to engineer one of the biggest upsets in GAA history, a lot will depend on Niall Morgan and if he is able to be more influential than the man he has often called his hero. Out-performing the greatest goalkeeper to play the game on the biggest day is asking a lot, but the Edendorknative has done enough this summer to suggest that he is up to the task.
It has taken Morgan time to earn the trust of everyone within Tyrone, including Mickey Harte. When they set out on the back-roads that took them to Croke Park this year, the 27year-old even found himself dropped in favour of Mickey O’Neill for the opening qualifier against Meath. However, since the Super 8s, he has been the undisputed number one. And one of the chief reasons why the county’s in their first All-Ireland final in a decade.
Morgan’s temperament has since the baptism of fire that was his Championship debut in Ballybofey back in 2013. Morgan was only 21 at the time and had to be persuaded by Harte to leave behind a soccer career with Dungannon Swifts the previous autumn.
In his first four months as the regular goalkeeper, he kicked 0-19 from frees and 45s as his team reached the league final, losing by a point to Dublin in a match that saw Jim Gavin win his first trophy as manager. Heading to play Donegal, who were defending their All Ireland title, Morgan was viewed as Harte’s most potent weapon. But his placekicking was poor on his Championship debut, converting just one of six attempts. Morgan’s reaction to the one he scored was to fist-pump and cup his ear to the home crowd, which meant they whipped themselves into a frenzy with each miss.
It is six years since Harte approached a young Morgan, who had played in goals for Northern Ireland Under-21s, and asked him to give up his soccer dreams to concentrate on Tyrone. There have been ups and downs. Following the experience in Ballybofey, his first season was cut short by a bad knee injury.
In his first All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry in 2015, Morgan was faced by a ‘full-court press’ every time he put the ball on the kicking tee. Time and again, he failed to see a free white shirt.
‘As much as there is 80,000 people around you, Croke Park can become a very lonely place if you have just lost two or three kickouts in a row,’ Morgan has said before of that experience.
The most fundamental change to the way Tyrone have played in the past two years has been a renewed emphasis on their kickout policy. Morgan, who used to favour kicking it short, is now well able to mix it.
In last year’s Ulster SFC semifinal, Donegal’s tactics centred on squeezing Tyrone on their short kick-out and forcing turnovers.
Instead, Morgan repeatedly went long with his kick-outs. More than 75 per cent of them travelled past the 45m line. It showed a new dimension to Morgan’s game, one that comes with working with John Devine, the former All-Ireland-winning goalkeeper who has been the specialist coach in Harte’s backroom team for the past two seasons. Devine works exclusively with Morgan and O’Neill in one of Tyrone’s training sessions every week.
This summer, there has been even more variation to Morgan’s restarts. In the first-half of the Super 8 encounter against Dublin in Omagh, all but two of his kickouts went long. And each of them reached a team-mate. Indeed, Morgan’s kicking off the tee that evening was better than the man he considers his role model.
Tyrone’s only genuine goal chance in that game came directly from Morgan. With Cathal McShane, his preferred receiver when kicking long, fooling the Dublin defence with a decoy run, Richie Donnelly fetched a high kick-out and released McShane. Only a wonderful tackle from Paul Mannion, of all players, denied Tyrone a first-half goal.
Harry Loughran’s goal, that altered the complexion of Tyrone’s final Super 8 game against Donegal, also came from Morgan’s kick-out when he spotted the runs of Mattie Donnelly and Peter Harte. His second-half performance in Ballybofey buried the demons of five years earlier and it was all the more impressive because of a couple of mistakes made late in the first-half.
One kick-out went too short. He missed a free that he would be expected to nail before another short kick-out was turned over by Ryan McHugh, resulting in Michael Murphy blasting the ball into the net. But Morgan’s recovery from that spell was Cluxtonesque. His precision off the tee defined Tyrone’s second-half.
Mini-meltdowns is part and parcel of being a goalkeeper. Remember Stephen Cluxton’s hairy few minutes before half-time in the 2016 All-Ireland semi-final when Kerry squeezed up on his kickouts. In the second-half, the Dublin captain was back to his best.
More than his accuracy off the kicking tee, his place-kicking or his shot-stopping, it is Cluxton’s ability to bounce back from mistakes that has made him ‘the king of keepers’ as Morgan once said.
If there is a stage to claim Cluxton’s crown, it is in Croke Park this Sunday. And if Morgan manages that, it may prove yet again that goalkeeper is now the most important position on the pitch.