Serious work ahead for Tyrone, warns Colm Cavanagh

Colm Cavanagh has played down Tyrone’s storming start to the season and insisted they must improve to live with the likes of Dublin and Kerry in the championship.

Mickey Harte’s Red Hands have impressively secured promotion back to Division 1 of the Allianz League after just five games. They’ve won all 10 of their games in total since January 1 and are on the verge of adding the Division 2 league title to their McKenna Cup and O Fiaich Cup crowns.

The strong form is no great surprise to neutrals considering Tyrone reached last year’s All-Ireland semi-finals and won the 2015 U21 title. But Cavanagh, operating as a sweeper this year, said the reality is they haven’t faced any of the top teams yet.

He insisted while they comfortably accounted for Meath to secure promotion on Sunday, there’s “serious work to be done” before they could take on Dublin or Kerry.

“We made a lot of mistakes, we made a lot of unforced errors,” said Cavanagh. “We dug in deep, showed a bit of character and held out to win the game. But if you look at the amount of errors we made, there’s still serious work to be done on the training ground to iron out them because against Dublin, Kerry, any of those teams, we’d have been well beaten today.”

Cavanagh shrugged at the suggestion Tyrone’s graph is definitely on an upward curve, however, given their excellent 2015 championship and their strong start to this year.

“It’s tough to say. It’s a new year, a new team, a different division. Things have started well for us but it only takes a defeat or two. Like, if we don’t win our last two games we’ll not be in a good place either going into the Division 2 final.

“Generally, we’re happy. We’ve hit our aim of getting back to Division 1 but, we still have things to improve on.”