Chance to banish ghost of JBM
Eleven months earlier, Harte was full-forward on a Tyrone minor team that fell three points short of Cork and an All-Ireland title in the same stadium and here was the same man who did for them in ‘72 doubling the dose a year later.
“I remember it well,” he recalls. “I was in Croke Park for that game (in ‘73) and obviously we wouldn’t have many fond memories of the day here in Tyrone.
“It wasn’t the best of games in fact, if memory serves me correctly.
“Jimmy Barry Murphy scored two goals for Cork. He really came into his own that year with the seniors but I wasn’t surprised. Jimmy had played against us in the minor final the year before. He scored two goals that day as well. One of them was a penalty. He was always the kind of player who might be kept quiet for 45-50 minutes and then he would just come with a few goals. That was the kind of player he was.”
Better days were just around the corner for the Tyrone minors. There was no Jimmy Barry Murphy to come between them and the Tom Markham Cup in September of 73 but the success of Harte’s successors only illuminated his own disappointment.
In conversation with this paper two years ago Harte spoke of how his own side was so quickly forgotten despite coming so close and how the class of ‘73 was still being feted 25 years later because they had won an All-Ireland.
“We were just nothing,” he said at the time and the revelation provided by Cork in 1972 of how thin the line is between failure and success has served him well in the last dozen years at minor, U21 and senior management levels.
Thirty-six years on and here come Cork again. The counties have yet to write another chapter in their mutual senior championship history but Harte has other painful experiences of the Rebels that also need exorcising.
The counties met six years in a row in Division 1A of the National League between 2002 and 2007 and, though Tyrone just about won more than they lost, the last meeting at Páirc Uí Rinn has lingered longest in the memory.
Tyrone travelled south that weekend on the back of an impressive McKenna Cup campaign and with two wins from two bagged already in the league. Cork had lost to both Donegal and Kerry but still won by eight points. Harte emits a low chuckle when he is reminded of it.
“Yeah, as some of the commentators said at the time, we took a hell of a battering. That is for sure. They were on fire that night and they showed the potential they had. I had been saying for the previous four or five years that Cork were far better than the results in the championship actually portrayed.
“It’s not a surprise that eventually they would come to be a major force in the championship. I suppose they have had that thing with Kerry where they seem to have a degree ofdifficulty beating them outside of Munster but I think they are getting over those kinds of phobias now and just proving to be a quality side.
“They have an abundance of quality players with lots of experience and they have a bunch of young boys in there now as well who have been very successful at U21 level. That’s the secret.
“If you can blend those two areas together then you have a serious bunch of ingredients there and Cork have that at the minute. The younger players feel at home at that level and the older ones make them feel at home.”
With Cork and Kerry giving such breathtaking displays in their respective quarter-finals, the entire country is beginning to fret about the prospect of another all-Munster decider — no less than the twocounties themselves probably.
Harte’s only response to that is to let out another little chortle and say merely that Tyrone will be doing their best to throw a spanner in the works but how good are Cork on the basis of their game against Donegal? John Joe Doherty’s lads rocked up to Croke Park with their previously deflated reputations ballooned by victories against Derry and Galway and then folded like flat-pack Swedish furniture on the day.
“You can’t really look at the Donegal game as a true picture of anything. Cork won’t be doing that and nor will the rest of the country. It was one of those games where Donegal just ran out of steam, or whatever you might say.
“As the game developed they just weren’t there and Cork were allowed to do what they wanted to do. That wasn’t their fault. They could only play what was put in front of them. On that day Donegal didn’t put up any resistance.
“I’m sure Cork will be smart enough to know that every day can’t be like that. Nobody is going to run away with some silly notion that Cork think they are all that. Cork will think they are great because they are in an All-Ireland semi-final.”
He knows a thing or two about easy rides after the early weeks of summer spent sauntering through Ulster.
Usually a battleground, the race for the Anglo-Celt Cup was more like a procession this time.
Armagh, Derry and Antrim were all powerless against Tyrone’s combination of experience, skill, versatility, tactical nous and sheer hunger. Even Harte was taken aback by the serenity of it all. “Yes, it has been more straightforward if I am being honest about it. We would have expected a much tougher battle in Ulster. With the teams we were drawn against that is the least you would have expected to happen.
“But on any given day it didn’t happen and we got through without taxing ourselves as much as we would have expected to do. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, no-one really knows.
“You might want to be more battle-hardened for an All-Ireland campaign. It probably has its advantages and its disadvantages but we can’t do anything about that going into a semi-final. We’re there and we’ll do the best we can.”
It isn’t often that a Tyrone man has reason to give thanks to a neighbour from Armagh but Harte could hardly have asked for a more testing examination than that offered to them by Kieran McGeeney’s Kildare in the last eight.
On reflection, the Leinster finalists were the perfect opponents. An up and coming team, powerful and mobile and on a run but one yet to discover the alchemy that allows sides progress from nearly men to supermen.
Kildare played the role to perfection. They led by four points at the break, absorbed the blows when Tyrone responded and even caught a second wind with which to chase the champions through to the finish.
Perfect.
“You need purple patches in a game and you need to make those purple patches count. We got ours at the right time against Kildare, after the break. We came out with a strong message and sometimes you need to do that.
“That was a win in itself or us. It was a nip and tuck game after that but I think we had that ascendancy because we got our noses in front and we were able to keep them there. It was good for us.”
Next up, Cork. And a chance to banish the ghost of Jimmy Barry Murphy.
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