HARTE & SOUL
Tyrone boss has shaped the modern game but resists the notion that it’s now in crisis
AS EVER, the game is the thing for Mickey Harte. By the time his latest two-year tenure runs its course in 2017, he will have been in charge of Tyrone, between minor, under-21 and seniors for 27 years on the bounce. The delay before his latest term was agreed is a reminder that he is managing in changed circumstances, the credit run up by those three All-Ireland wins – the last seven years ago – is all but spent.
Had he not found a way to dig his team out of the hole which relegation and a first round defeat in Ulster had left them in mid-summer, there is little doubt that his board would have moved against him.
Instead, once more they found their wings in the qualifiers, soared to a second All-Ireland semi-final in three years and in the end the board had no other decision to make, other than the length of renewal.
But if that explains the mechanics of why Tyrone re-engaged the services of their most successful manager, it does not explain why Harte wanted to be back so bad.
It is true that his team’s run this summer confirmed his belief that he could be on the brink of something good again, but the sense is that it is the lure of the game, as much as the promise of glory, that keeps bringing him back.
That is not a hunch; he is as much an evangelist as a manager when he talks about the obsession with those who believe an evolving game must be saved from itself.
The reintroduction of ‘a mark’ is on the cards as a result of the deliberations of Croke Park’s playing rules committee chaired by Jarlath Burns, who has also hinted at a future move that would limit the number of consecutive hand-passes allowed.
Those proposals horrify Harte, who sees them not just in isolation but as part of an ongoing crusade to repackage football as a different game.
‘What is going on with this mark business? It is not going to add to more high fielding. How could it?
‘If someone has got a real good fielder on their team and the ball keeps getting kicked out to him, the opposition are not going to let him catch it. There is going be more breaking ball and less high fielding.
‘Why do we have to believe that the high catch is the one thing that everyone wants to see at a football match?
‘I don’t believe that for one minute. It is nice if someone does it but it is nice if someone can put a 40-metre diagonal pass onto someone’s chest, it is nice if someone sells a dummy to find space or makes a run to create the movement to lead to a score.
‘There are so many skills in our game to look at yet but we don’t invent a rule for someone to run out at an angle to get the ball.
‘Does he get the freedom now to say “everywrong one stand back I have the ball now, let me do as I want”. Of course he doesn’t, so why should we give an advantage to a player who catches the ball?
‘Remember that most players who are good at fielding are already blessed with an advantage, they are about 6ft 3 or 4in and now you are giving them another advantage. It is ridiculous.
‘People that are on about overuse of the hand-pass, results will sort that out, not rules. You can’t just go with a hand-passing game-plan and expect to win things, you have to be able to mix and match.
‘When people overuse the handpass in a non-productive way they will stop using it because it is not working,’ says Harte.
IT IS the declaration of a man still enthralled by a game which he has helped shape more than most in the last decade-and-a-half, and one maddened by what he believes to be a punditry-led nar- rative which has sought to talk the game into crisis.
The stampede to join Joe Brolly on a pulpit and denounce the modern game as the ugly offspring of something that was much more handsome grates.
‘Why not leave our game alone. Why don’t we focus on what is good about our game, instead of how can we tweak this and change that.
‘There is too much talk about what’s with the game and not enough about what is good about the game. Let’s turn the whole thing around.
‘There is this mindset out there that seems to suggest it is okay to be running down Gaelic football at every chance for some reason or another because you have certain vociferous people who think that if they say it loud enough, often enough, it becomes a truth.
‘It is not a truth at all; it is their little hobby horse.
‘You have to wonder where they have been for the last 50 years. Where have they been in this magical time where everything was brilliant, everything was top class and we had all these great breathtaking games?
‘That is not the way of the world. Some games are great, some are good, some average and some are not good at all and that has always been the case for as long as I have been watching it.’
For Harte, it’s not pundits looking back, it is GAA officialdom looking to far off green fields to sell the games to a new market, which grinds.
This autumn, hurling modified and reshaped was taken on tour to Boston’s Fenway Park by the GPA, while Harte’s disdain for International Rules is deep and long-held.
THE MARK and the curtailed hand-passing are up and running in that hybrid game, the possibility of a ‘toe-tap’ rule – as applied in Rugby League – is also expected to be trialled in the future; all moves driven, suggests Harte, to help package indigenous games to a global audience.
‘I don’t think we should be selling our soul to popularise our game.
‘Our game is very popular without it. I don’t think we should be diminishing our game to make it a global game.
‘Other sports became global and they did not do it by tearing up the scripts of their game to do it; they let people learn what their game was about and let them play.
‘Gaelic Games can do the same thing; we can let the world see how our games are played to get everyone else playing them.
‘I don’t think we need to be in a position where we sell our souls to be popular or global. We should become global as we are.’
If the macro issues of the game stirs him, it is the micro management of taking his county back to the top that drives him.
He does not have to bend his ears to the wind to know that he is no longer insulated by the success that he achieved in the past, but he remains frustrated by the failure to place the last five years – 2010 was their last Ulster title success – in context.
‘People can say what they will and they are going on results and if
I don’t believe for one minute that everyone wants to see a high catch
results are not good, the team is a spent force the manager is a spent docket as well.
‘People have to take stock of things, ask what is going on with the players in the county. If you have a really good bunch of players, and they are of a similar age, the vast majority of them will exit the stage around a similar time-frame, within two or three years.
‘When you reach that situation there is going to be a drop in the level of performance because you can’t replace that many men in an instant. That process of regenerating a team takes more time than some people would have the patience for but the time has come now for that transition to come to fruition.
‘Was last year a flash in the pan, as some people will suggest?
‘That is the challenge facing us now, can we offer more than that?
‘If we can’t, 2015 won’t be as good as it appears right now.’