Bradley belief in unfancied Antrim

LIAM BRADLEY believes his Antrim team are more than capable of making up for last year’s Ulster final disappointment by overcoming Mickey Harte’s Tyrone in Casement Park this Sunday.

The Derry man guided his adopted county to their longest-ever championship run last summer, taking Antrim to their first provincial final since 1970 before going toe-to-toe with Kerry in the last round of the qualifiers.

However, they fell short of Tyrone in that Ulster decider by six points and finished five adrift of Kerry in Tullamore and there is an inescapable feeling that they need a major scalp to build on those foundations this year.

“Well, what bigger scalp can you talk about than the opposition on Sunday week?” said Bradley. “They’re Ulster champions and if we can take that scalp that will be enough for everybody.

“Look, we know our standing in the country at the moment. We’re classed as a second-tier team but we’re playing the Ulster champions, they’re going to be strong opposition but it’s not something we’re afraid of. We feel we have a strong enough team and if everybody plays to their highest I think we can come out of it on the right side.”

Antrim’s fans contributed to a carnival atmosphere in Clones last July but the party atmosphere was muted before too long when Tyrone built up a 1-8 to 0-2 lead in the first-half.

Though the underdogs battled on gamely, they never once looked like threatening Tyrone’s grip on the Anglo-Celt Cup and Bradley admits that the occasions was very much a learning experience for his side.

“It was a combination of factors but the biggest factor was the lads had never been in that environment before. All the razzmatazz that goes with it, the President of Ireland was there and all the handshakes and red carpet that goes with Ulster final day.

“That had a big bearing on the game,” said the Glenullin man. “People say the game was over at half-time. Although we matched them stride for stride in the second-half all the damage had been done in the first. The occasion probably got to a few players.”

It is a measure of just how far Antrim have travelled under Bradley that they can look back wistfully on an Ulster final defeat and the progress has continued thus far into 2010.

A second successive league promotion – they will now play Division Two next year – was assured in the spring but a worrying trend has been detected in the last year-and-a-bit.

That Ulster final defeat to Tyrone has now been sandwiched between two league final losses to Sligo and Kevin Walsh’s side outplayed them comprehensively in the latter in Croke Park late last month.

Only five points separated the sides when all was said and done but it was a margin that failed to reflect the dominance of a Sligo team that rattled off 19 points, many seemingly at will.

“Everybody says now we didn’t want to win that league final but I can tell you now we did want to win it. On the night we weren’t good enough, Sligo were sharper and seemed to have done a lot more work than we had.

“They deserved their four-point victory. We sat down and looked at the DVD and seen what we did wrong. When I looked at it we really didn’t play as bad as I thought we did.

“We missed a lot of chances. We got crucified three or four times for the hand-pass rule when we were in good scoring positions. Those wee things are crucial at times. So, maybe it wasn’t as negative as I thought at the time.”

None of that will matter if Tyrone can be toppled at the weekend and there are one or two factors in their favour, one of which may well be the fact that they will have home advantage in Belfast.

Tyrone are coming off the back of a league campaign in which they were relegated and they are also carrying a handful of injury concerns.

It could be interesting.