The good, the bad and the ugly
Enjoy it a while, Tyrone. Pick up one of those special dispensation passes. Admire the tenacity, ferocity of the team, the exuberance of Eoin Mulligan, the raw power of Sean Cavanagh, the attention to detail of Mickey Harte.
Then join the post mortem.
Because the rest of the country feels cheated. They took a subway down to football’s Quality Street, and ended up detouring to Mean Street.
Where inspiration and innovation are suppressed by foul means; where first up tackles, bear hugs and Half Nelsons turn the clash of the most country’s exciting teams into a cross between rugby league and WWF.
Don’t blame Armagh. They weren’t there yesterday. Tyrone and Kerry combined for 73 frees in the All-Ireland semi-final, with the victors conceding 43 of them. Then again, they had everything to protect in a frantic, foul second half, endured by 59,000 bewildered supporters.
Kerry were more ragged than rugged, probably because they were chasing their conquerors from the get-go and too busy trying to salvage the remains of a battered aura of invincibility. They can expect a dressing down at home, not least for an astonishing dearth of tactical nous.
Tyrone, meanwhile, can get dressed up for the first all-Ulster All-Ireland final.
“We’re still not a finished product, because there was no cups handed out today,” Harte recanted. “If we don’t win the All-Ireland, we’re still a team that hasn’t done it.”
After 20 minutes of Tyrone turbo, Harte’s side led by six points to no score, and they enjoyed a 0-9 to 0-2 lead at half time. They held Kerry scoreless for 24 minutes, blowing them apart all over the field, but they clearly brought more than a seven-point lead to the interval dressing room with them.
When they returned, they had transformed themselves into an Italian side protecting a 1-0 lead. They could see the outline of a September Sunday and they invited their foe into their web. Kerry obliged, diving headlong into a recurring nightmare of embarrassing ineptness. Much as they failed to deal with Armagh’s second-half full-press last September, they fell asunder when Tyrone road-blocked them yesterday.
Insisted jubilant Tyrone boss Harte: “The quality was fine to me. We had to scavenge for every ball we got. Okay, it was not the classic high-scoring game that people anticipated, but was it every going to be like that? Was one team going to let the other walk past them and score for fun? The scoring average was bound to come down. Both teams were going to see to that.
“We had to work hard to win this game and our players were prepared to do that. Was it not a spectacle? I’m sorry, but we didn’t want a pretty game, we wanted a pretty result,” Harte said.
His Kerry counterpart, Paídí Ó Sé refused the bait when asked if Tyrone’s second-half tactics were cynical. But he admitted: “The blanket defence certainly worked. It’s the first time I have ever played against these kind of tactics, but it’s within the rules. Whether its cynical or not, they are in an All-Ireland final, that’s what matters. It worked on us.”
The Tyrone players were still milking the moment on the pitch as Kerry slipped quietly out the back door, leaving Dublin for the third successive season with winter questions ahead of them.
Seamus Moynihan, whose titanic tussle with Canavan was short-circuited with every other salacious thought we dared hold beforehand, tried hard to muster some sense to it all.
“Football has changed. The day of staying in your position is gone. Now, everybody’s behind the ball. Out around midfield is like walking down Times Square in New York, but that’s the way it has gone.
“We didn’t react to it, we just don’t play football like that down in Kerry. Maybe we’ll have to change, because if we don’t.......”
He paused for a moment, searching for a positive.
“If we could have grabbed a goal, scraped a draw, got ourselves out of today, we’d be wiser, having learned so much. Everything seems fine when you score 21 points one day, but that’s not going to happen all the time. The six points we got were so hard earned.”
Harte has only one cloud on his horizon: the sight of Canavan on crutches and possibly missing the final. But, even after hobbling off in the 13th minute, he played his part.
“This was the time to stand up and say ‘we’ll do it for you, Peter’,” the coach said. “Maybe it hasn’t been done often enough for him. He’s had to carry the can and, in the past, if he was gone we fell apart. But we showed that there is life after Peter Canavan. Too see him in the dressing room at half time on crutches helped the players focus.”
What the future holds for Paídí Ó Sé, few know. His term as coach has expired, but attempting to read the tea-leaves from his quotes is an act of folly. However, it will be more of a surprise to see him stay than it will to see him depart.
Harte felt the Kingdom deserved respect for their second-half performance, as they whittled down the deficit to 0-10 to 0-6 with 10 minutes remaining. “It would have been easy to lie down and die, but they didn’t, they still thought they could win that game.”
Was that any comfort, Seamus Moynihan was asked. “No, not a bit. We were beaten.”
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