Pain of defeat by Mayo spurred the Red Hands on for their Croker cruise
ON ANOTHER occasion Mickey Harte might have been inclined to sugarcoat the facts after an 18-point demolition, to make them just a small bit more palatable for the losers. The Tyrone manager didn’t seem in much of a mood for diplomacy though and insisted he always believed that his team would beat old rivals Armagh, and comfortably.
‘Logic’, according to Harte, dictated that a Division 1 team that’s captured back-to-back Ulster C+hampionships, and has genuine designs on the All-Ireland title, would beat a Division 3 team that came through the qualifiers. Hard to argue with that one, in fairness.
‘I felt that we were good enough to have the type of score difference that we had throughout the Ulster campaign because I felt that we were in a better place than Armagh,’ said Harte.
‘They were a side that had done very well after losing the first round in Ulster and they gained a bit of momentum but you have to look at the reality of it and the reality was that they played their football in Division 3 – we played our football in Division 1.
‘We would expect to be ahead of them. We did expect to win the game, we did expect to win with a bit to spare. That’s the truth of the matter. I can’t see any reason why we couldn’t logic that out.’
Harte admitted that Tyrone were motivated by the memory of their unexpected Round 2 qualifier defeat to Armagh in 2014, as well as last year’s All-Ireland quarterfinal defeat to Mayo.
‘Obviously these things crossed our minds as we prepared for the game,’ the three-time All-Ireland winning boss said. ‘We were very disappointed to lose in Omagh in that particular game. So yes, you have to store those things up and bring them forward to use when you can.
‘But you can’t depend on it either, you have to have quality players who are prepared to put their bodies on the line and get those results. No amount of mental wanting to win will make it happen, the players have got to physically go out and make it happen.
‘We walked out of here at this same stage last year after losing to Mayo and we were not happy people because we had put a lot into the year up to that and we’d played enough football that day to at least get a second chance and we didn’t get it.
‘That’s soul destroying when you think of the work and time and energy that these boys put in. This has been brewing in us for a year and we’re very happy to have been able to get back and to give ourselves a chance to be playing later in August.’
Harte heaped praise on David Mulgrew who came on in the second half and killed off Armagh with 2-1.
‘He’s a good young footballer, that’s why he had played in a lot of the Ulster Championship and it was probably a bit difficult on him not to start this one,’ said Harte.
‘But that was some response that David Mulgrew gave to not starting the game. He looked so energised and he looked so cool. He finished like an out-and-out finisher yet he’s actually a much more all-around-the-field type of player. His first goal was the one that really settled the game for us.’
Kieran McGeeney’s Armagh were blown out of the water and never had any real period of dominance.
‘When the game is over you’re left with the facts staring you in the face,’ said McGeeney. ‘We retracted into our shell a wee bit, missed easy chances, ran into culde-sacs. I think we’re a better team than we showed but that’s just the way it went today.
‘There’s probably a number of factors for it. We played a certain way all year and then when you miss one or two players, that can have a bit of an effect on it. We didn’t react well at the start, we wanted to move the ball quickly but didn’t and got caught up.
‘I didn’t feel that we committed enough men to attack, it was ones and twos instead of threes and fours and lads got caught on their own and were suffocated.
‘Tyrone are very good at that, they’ve been working on that for a while. Armagh are just going to have to learn how to deal with that,’ he concluded.