Tyrone suffer capital punishment

TYRONE will be playing NFL Division Two football for the first time in the 21st century next year, courtesy of a power-packed first-half display from a Dublin side playing their best football of the campaign.

Let’s start with Tyrone’s fall.

Mickey Harte would have gladly taken wins over Cork and Kerry before this campaign started but no-one would have guessed that Tyrone would slip through the relegation trapdoor having beaten the two Munster giants.

So it proved.

The fact is that the three-time All-Ireland champions were hugely fortunate to claim both of those scalps at Healy Park and Dublin didn’t make the same mistakes in letting Tyrone off the hook once they had them snared.

“It’s disappointing to leave this division after being in it for so long,” said Harte.

“We have to come to terms with that but we were living on a knife edge the whole way through. We just didn’t get the points when we needed them.

“Then we got a good couple of wins against Cork and Kerry but you just can’t rest on those things. I suppose the writing was on the wall. If you were living that close to the edge, some day you will fall off. Today we fell off it.”

And so to Dublin’s rise.

Mayo’s win in Cork deprived Pat Gilroy’s side of a first league final appearance since 1999 but that was the only negative for Gilroy on a day when Dublin’s form matched the unseasonably hot weather.

“I would have fancied Mayo to beat Cork because they had more to gain out of that game,” said Gilroy when informed of the finishing table. “Cork were already through to the league final, so what was there for them?

“It was really the Galway (defeat) that we will look back on.

“Had we won that we would be in the final now but, anyway, we move on. It is a little bit of a disappointment but the performance here was one of the better ones for us.”

Indeed it was. The Leinster champions were awesome in the first half. They scored 2-10 in that period – all but one point of which came from open play – and Bernard Brogan was the star of the show.

The Oliver Plunketts/Eoghan Ruadh forward claimed seven points in that period. Five came in the first 16 minutes although the decision just before the last of those to shadow him with Conor Gormley gradually curbed his influence.

Well, on the scoresheet anyway. Brogan was just as central to the two goals scored in the five minutes before the break which left Tyrone with an almost impossible task if they were to retain their top-flight status.

The first came after he robbed Aidan Cassidy and ended with his brother Alan finding the net under Jonathan Curran. The second stemmed from the two siblings’ passing move and ended with a Niall Corkery finish.

It was clinical stuff from a Dublin side that has won admiring glances for its work rate and willingness to defend throughout this campaign but little for its efforts closer to the opposition’s goalposts.

Incredibly, they didn’t hit a single wide in all that time. Tyrone did. Six, in total, but what will have hurt Harte more is the fact that his team were outfought as much as they were outplayed.

Dublin conceded three times as many frees in that first 35 minutes and they would end the game having amassed eight yellow cards – and a red – to the home side’s one caution. A telling statistic.

The only time Dublin looked in danger of losing was the third quarter which started with goalkeeper Michael Savage being stripped of possession by Martin Penrose whose shot was punched to the net by Colm Cavanagh.

Two points, from Peter Harte and Sean Cavanagh, squeezed the gap back to five points and Dublin’s problems were compounded at the far end where they began to rack up some wides of their own.

Making matters worse was the fact that Michael McAuley could have put the game to bed with a pair of spurned goal chances but they finally settled again with a point from David Henry. The wing-forward was then sent to the line for a second yellow with six minutes to go but Dublin had weathered the home storm by then and thoughts already turned to the various permutations and the bigger picture.

Scorers for Tyrone: S Cavanagh 0-4 (0-3f), C Cavanagh 1-0, K Coney 0-2, A Cassiday 0-1, P Harte 0-1, M Penrose 0-1, B McGuigan 0-1, K Hughes 0-1.

Scorers for Dublin: B Brogan 0-8 (0-6f), N Corkery 1-0, A Brogan 1-1, McManamon 0-2, E Fennell 0-1, D Henry 0-1, M McAuley 0-1.

Subs for Tyrone: C McCarron for McMahon 13, K Hughes for Donnelly 35, R Mellon for McGuigan 56, Shaun O’Neill for D Harte 58, N McKenna for Coney 60.

Subs for Dublin: M McAuley for McConnell 24, A Brogan for Hubbard 29, B Cahill for Bastic 34, D Connolly for Flynn 49, E O’Gara for McAuley 61.

Referee: D Fahy (Longford).