Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Even our top stars of past didn’t have to face team like this
HARTE ADMITS DUBS ARE GREATEST NEMESIS
NOW in his 17th season in charge of Tyrone, Mickey Harte has faced down many challenges over the course of his lengthy tenure.
Tyrone came through to win three All-irelands in the last decade when the Kerry team of that era was arguably the second best the county had ever produced, only trailing behind their recordbreaking side of the 70s and 80s, while Armagh were a hugely formidable force at the time too.
In this decade, however, Harte has tried and failed on five occasions in the Championship to crack Dublin, who he says by now “have a bigger repertoire of things that make them difficult to beat” compared to his previous rivals, as he prepares to face them again at Croke Park on Saturday evening.
“It is very hard to lift the whole scenario from one era into another and compare like with like,” he says. “That’s not easy.
“Armagh had a very good team, Kerry had a very good team that we were in battle with, Dublin at that time had a very good team that didn’t get the rub of the green, never got the breakthrough.
“But I think Dublin just pose more problems, there is more structure and more thinking that goes into them as an opposition that I probably believe would have been spent on any other team.
“I think this Dublin team have a bigger repertoire of things that make them difficult to beat.”
Harte accepts that the suite of options available to him as Tyrone manager now aren’t quite as broad as they were a decade ago, but then says that the likes of Peter Canavan, Stephen O’neill and Brian Mcguigan are “once in a generation players”.
“It is a harder challenge for modern day players to have to deal with what Dublin have to offer.
“I’m not sure any players, even our best players of the past, had to deal with all of those things.
“They had to deal maybe with the footballing prowess (of opposition) generally, but not all the backup and added value that comes nowadays with a high class, organised outfit that Dublin are.”
Referencing last year’s All-ireland final, when Tyrone started well before being swamped near halftime, Harte observes: “They will be content to play with a team and not be too concerned about the scoreline in the first 20 or 25 minutes, but they do seem to have an injection then of something, it comes at vital stages of the game.
“Being aware of it is one thing and dealing with it is another thing.
“But I also feel if we all felt that this was an impossible task, we would be doing ourselves and the country at large a disservice.”