TYRONE MARCH TO OLD BEAT
IN A footballing day from hell the only thing to admire is the limitless fervour with which Tyrone greet every new season. Gut-checks do not come more brutish than this, eye-balled by a Fermanagh team whose physical intent was reflected in the red card shown to Kane Connor before half-time, as well as yellow cards to seven others.
Add that to the glue-pot Brewster Park pitch, swirling wind and driving rain, which reduced the second half to such a slug-fest that just three points were scored.
And, yet, when it was all over, Tyrone — a team with reason to have taste for far finer prizes than the McKenna Cup — will next Sunday seek to win Ulster’s pre-season tournament for the seventh year in a row.
The flip-side is that, though as much as that is a compliment, it could also be construed as hard evidence that they are living out an unfulfilling Groundhog Day existence.
In going hard early, they are marching to Mickey Harte’s 16-year mantra that there is no game worth playing that is not worth winning.
Perhaps, but a lorry load of McKenna Cups and even a trophy cabinet full of Anglo Celts — the latter a possibility given the Ulster championship’s weakshowed ening pulse — will not disguise the fact that Harte and Tyrone’s challenge is that they have got to find a way to win the games that really matter.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Harte’s third and last Sam Maguire triumph — no manager has ever gone longer while remaining in the same dugout after an All-Ireland win — and it has been their inability to take down the heavy-punchers which has caught them out time and again.
If they are to mark that anniversary by taking the Championship later this summer, then is more than likely they will have to take down at least two from Kerry, Mayo and Dublin.
That has been an issue for the last decade — their Championship record against the big three makes for depressing reading with seven defeats from seven starts.
And it is not difficult to see why they have suffered. They can hammer lesser teams for fun — as they when stinging Armagh for 3-17 in last August’s quarter-final — but against the big three they have flirted with impotency.
They have averaged just 12 points in those seven defeats — the kind of return that can only be found on the toe-tag of a Championship corpse.
The question this time is if the most traumatic of those losses — last summer’s 12-point torching by Dublin — will see a change of mindset, convincing Harte that the ultra-defensive game-plan he borrowed from another of his tormentors, Jim McGuinness, is now redundant.
The answer to that is likely to be in the affirmative, but even so that will guarantee little if he does not have the offensive talent to trade blows with the big boys.
Yesterday revealed little given Harte’s penchant for picking strong teams for this competition, although he gave a run to the highly rated Ronan McHugh — top scorer in Tyrone’s club game last season — and has Conor McAliskey back, fully recovered from the cruciate injury that sidelined him last year.
To be fair to the latter, he did, in a rare moment of quality, kick a sublime first-half point to ease Tyrone into a 0-3 to 0-0 lead after 11 minutes. But that also equated to half of his team’s entire tally from open play — Ronan O’Neill coming off the bench to kick a score in the 67th minute, in the process ending a 26-minute stalemate too painful for recall.
This represented a little of the best and a lot of the worst of Ulster football.
It might have been a pre-season game but it wore the clothes of Championship, which serves as a testament to both teams, but Fermanagh paid the price for being too up for it.
Not only did they trail by 0-6 to 0-3 at half-time, but they also lost corner-back Connor to a double yellow card just before the interval.
It was a card that was coming, with six of the eight yellow cards handed out by referee Ciaran Brannigan at that stage going Fermanagh’s way.
Sadly, the Erne men were not quite as prolific in front of the posts with their entire first-half three-point haul coming between the 12th and 14th minute, while Ryan Jones’s point in the opening minute of the second half would also be their last.
‘It’s one of those days when it’s all about the result. Conditions were very bad there. There will be days when you have to deal with that. This was a good lesson for us in dealing with that,’ reflected Harte afterwards.
But it is the lessons of the last 10 years that need to be heeded by Harte and Tyrone. TYRONE: M O’Neill; HP McGeary (P Hampsey h-t), A McCrory, M Cassidy; C McLaughlin, M Donnelly (R McNabb 70+1), K McGeary; B McDonnell (P McNulty 47), D McClure; R Donnelly, N Sludden, C McCann; D McCurry(R O’Neill 52), R McHugh, C McAliskey (P Harte 43).
Scorers: D McCurry 0-3 (3f) C McAliskey 0-2 (1f), D McClure, R O’Neill, R Donnelly 0-1. Wides: (2) 7. Frees: (12) 19.
Yellow cards: HP McGeary 21, C McAliskey 29, B McDonnell 43, K McGeary 58.
FERMANAGH: P Cadden; C McManus, C Cullen, K Connor; J McMahon, L Cullen (E McManus 70+1), D McCusker; E Donnelly, R Jones; B Mulrone, R Lyons (R Corrigan 40), A Breen (E Courtney 61); D Teague (E McHugh 52), C Jones, Seamus Quigley (Sean Quigley 47).
Scorers: S Quigley (1f), B Mulrone, R Jones, A Breen 0-1. Wides: (1) 2. Frees: (6) 15.
Yellow cards: C Jones 9, R Lyons 21, K Connor 29, 35+4, C Cullen 33, R Jones 35+1, E McHugh 64, L Cullen 67.
Red cards: K Connor 35+4). Referee: C Brannigan (Down).