Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
McGUIGAN: WE HAVE GOT TO COUNTER
TO stick or to twist, it’s the giant question Mickey Harte has been mulling over all week.
For Brian McGuigan, there’s no dilemma at all - if Tyrone want to beat Kerry then they have to keep doing what they do best. Defending.
Tyrone were more attack minded at the start of the summer but conceded 1-13 and 2-9 tallies to Derry and Antrim before being cut open by Donegal.
They’ve been more defensive since and have rekindled their best form with ex-attacker McGuigan (below) insisting they must play that way again.
He said: “They’re going to have to because with the likes of David Clifford in there you can’t leave your man one on one with him. It’s going to have to be a combination of two or three men teaming up.
“We have quality counter-attacking players with the likes of Niall Sludden, Peter Harte and Mattie Donnelly. That’s the system that suits our play. We saw against Donegal that we can’t go man for man.
“We tried to play in the League man on man and tried to play a more attacking approach. But you only have to look at the Derry game where they got their goal straight through the middle and Antrim, a Division 4 team, got two goals against us.
“If we want to keep conceding goals and losing games that’s fair enough but we weren’t going to win that way.
“So Mickey had to revert back to type, the system which suits the players that he has at his disposal at the minute is the counter-attacking defensive game.”
McGuigan said that whatever the outcome, Harte deserves huge credit for taking Tyrone to their third All-Ireland semi-final in a row.
The three-time All-Ireland winner added: “A lot of people keep knocking Mickey but you have to give him credit for continuously coming back and bringing this team back. If you go back to when the final whistle went against Donegal, you couldn’t see us getting back to where we are now. It’s a credit to them that they have.”