Hard miles don’t bother Harte’s new ‘machine’
Three more newbies came on before the evening was out and, with that, talk of a ‘New Tyrone’ was born.
That perception has carried on through the Allianz League campaign and into a summer which has taken them as far as this Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo and Harte himself has been prominent in propagating talk of a different dawn.
“Getting them to the last four is a major achievement for us at this stage because we are in the process of rebuilding,” he said last week. “There’s very few of the original ’03 team playing and starting our games. This is a really new team in many, many ways.”
That’s a statement worth dwelling on. Harte was correct in the sense that only three of those who featured against Armagh in 2003 remain but the fact is that eight of his current panel played a part in defeating Kerry five Septembers ago.
The spine of this Tyrone team consists of veterans including goalkeeper Pascal McConnell, Conor Gormley and Sean Cavanagh and they are surrounded by men hardly lacking in experience. Seventeen of the 2013 panel earned Ulster medals as recently as three years ago.
Whatever else they are or are not, these Tyrone players are no babes in the wood and their reliance on the nous of elders has been personified by the tours de force offered up by Sean Cavanagh against Meath and Monaghan.
Though his league campaign was iffy, Cavanagh had served notice of his intentions in that McKenna Cup tie against Derry seven months ago, even if the late winning goal by rookie Conor McAliskey fed seamlessly into the narrative of a rebirth.
The Moy man was superb that night, by all accounts.
Having missed the 2012 championship, he went out on his return and scored seven points in a dominant performance. Three of them, one a monster from play, came at a spell in the second-half after Derry had pulled three clear and threatened to put the game to bed.
Without Cavanagh there is no doubt that Tyrone’s interest in this season’s championship race would have been run before now and yet to tag them as a one-man outfit would be grossly unfair.
A fully fit Tyrone team would still be able to boast – besides those already mentioned — Joe and Justin McMahon, Peter Harte, Stephen O’Neill and Dermot Carlin.
That’s a none-too-shabby line-up for a side that has lost a plethora of top-class players since their last All-Ireland title in 2008 but the real boost this year has been the emergence of some fresh and not-so-fresh faces to greater prominence.
It looked like the end of Cathal McCarron’s career when he got roasted by Bernard Brogan in the 2010 quarter-final but he has turned that around and established himself at corner-back while Ciaran McGinley, a club forward used as a wing-back, has started four times this summer.
Scores and scorers have long been a chief concern for Tyrone, no more so than now as O’Neill struggles on despite an injury, but in Darren McCurry, Ronan O’Neill, Ronan McNabb and McAliskey they possess a quartet of whom much is expected in the years to come if not so much on Sunday.
Yet, if there are poster boys for the Tyrone template then they would probably be the two Donnellys, Mark and Mattie. Both have flitted around the fringes of the squad for some time but have only cemented their places with gut-busting and versatile performance in recent times.
Mark Donnelly was rated by many as Tyrone’s most important player during the spring. The one game he missed, against Cork, saw Harte’s side outclassed. Mattie Donnelly? Suffice to say he has been described in dispatches as a younger Joe McMahon.
“There’s no one aspect to them,” says Johnny Doyle whose Kildare side met and lost to Tyrone three times this season. “Cavanagh has obviously been superb but Conor Gormley has been too and Sean O’Neill always takes watching and leaves space for others even if he isn’t on top form.
“They have a good balance to them. They’ve lost a lot of household names but they have been able to sprinkle in a few new ones. Huge credit must go to Mickey Harte for that. They’ve won a lot of tight games. They’re like a machine and, in a way, they remind of that Armagh team of ten years ago in that they’re never beaten.”
We shall see.
