Harte may see bright future but numbers don’t stack up
TYRONE’S WIDES DIDN’T HINT AT THEM CLOSING THE GAP ON DUBS
THERE is little doubt he meant it, but Mickey Harte’s promise to the Tyrone supporters who came out to greet him last Monday evening could just as easily be interpreted as wishful thinking.
‘There’s a lot of special young men here who want to have that trophy in the future.
‘There’s no guarantee on anything in life but if I’d put my money on anyone to do this in the near future, I’d put it on us,’ said Harte from the stage at Healy Park.
The optimism of those words jarred with the size of the audience who turned out to listen.
For this was a homecoming unlike any that Harte had experienced before; the three previous times he brought his team back from Dublin the day after an All-Ireland they had to negotiate their way through the giddy madness that greets all champions.
This time, when the rolled into Aughnacloy last Monday, there was a few hundred to cheer them as they emerged from the team bus.
And when they landed in Healy Park, despite the best efforts of Tyrone’s official twitter account to ‘big it up’ as some kind of Mardi Gras, the numbers gathered was somewhere between two and three hundred.
In a county renowned for its hardcore support, and one that had spent 10 years waiting for an All-Ireland final to come around, that show of support suggested that more saw this as a shot in the dark rather than the beginning of something special.
Tyrone’s previous two losing All-Ireland final appearances in 1986 and ’95, saw gaps of nine and eight years before they came back and delivered on that third year lucky theory in 2003.
On that basis, it should be seven years before they are back on final day again, and while that can easily scoffed at, the pledge that this Tyrone team is best-placed to take Dublin down is no more credible that leaning on number sequencing.
The bottom line is that this Tyrone team simply lacks the quality to be champions.
Harte will argue that point by identifying another set of numbers – they went from losing by 12 points to six in the space of a year against the champions. Again, with the blessing of mathematical sequencing, it will be a drawn game when they meet again.
Indeed, he suggested that there was a perverse comfort in the 16 wides they kicked last Sunday.
‘If we were to have even taken 50 per cent of those off and that’s still allowing you to have more wides then Dublin then there’d have been a very different outcome in terms of the game,’ suggested Harte at a press brief in the City West Hotel last Monday morning.
At that same briefing, he dismissed the notion that Tyrone had paid the price for not possessing a ‘marquee’ forward, claiming that what was needed was a spread of scorers in the modern game rather than leaning on one star attacker.
There is logic in that, but what Tyrone suffered from was a deficit in leaders as much as a lack of composure.
For starters, they did not kick 16 wides; four of those were overcooked passes that went over the end-line.
And of the dozen wides they kicked, half of them were down to poor execution, the other six were down to poor decision–making.
Contrast that with Dublin who, out of the miserly half dozen wides they racked up, only one was sourced in poor decisionmaking – Philly McMahon’s snatched effort from outside the scoring zone in the first half.
Tyrone’s missed opportunities did not hint at them closing the gap on Dublin, but rather revealed the chasm to be getting wider.
Tyrone’s difficulty in bridging that gap is two-fold.
There is, despite Harte’s protests, a deficit in the kind of forward talent that an All-Ireland-winning team – as opposed to an Ulster Championship winning one – needs and there is no solution in sight.
The top scorer in Tyrone club football so far this season is Darren McCurry – the same Darren McCurry who walked away from Harte’s panel earlier this season because he was frustrated with a lack of gametime.
In terms of the production line, Harte is waiting for the second coming of Canavan, in Peter the Great’s son, Darragh.
But he is only 18 and is still at least two years down the track, while DD Mulgrew – who missed this season with a shoulder injury – could be available next year.
And perhaps, Harte could sweettalk McCurry into coming back, but there is not a whole lot in that to be going on.
But what he must really hope for is that lessons will be learned from last Sunday and, as a result, tleaders will emerge from the likes of Paudie Hampsey, Michael McKernan, Kieran McGeary, Cathal McShane and Lee Brennan.
Because they need them. The failure of their big players, Colm Cavanagh – in truth, out of keeping with his form – Mattie Donnelly, Peter Harte, Niall Sludden and Tiernan McCann to deliver on the biggest stage was their undoing.
In failing to get a grip on the game, composure and control went out the window and it leaves big questions over the temperament of those players.
Above all, it asks the question if they are really good enough to get back there?
Only time, or sequential numbers, will tell.