Joe McMahon kicks around ‘risk-taker’ Mickey Harte’s options

By Paul Keane

Even Joe McMahon, 13 years a lionheart of Tyrone teams, can’t quite bring himself to tip his county to beat Dublin in the All-Ireland.

“I think all the pressure’s on Dublin and nobody, as you know, is giving Tyrone a chance,” fudged McMahon when asked if Tyrone would win. Eventually, after a pause, the big Omagh man who retired last year, concluded that, “I definitely think they can give it a go”.

Hardly a ringing endorsement yet what the pragmatic McMahon can say for certain is that Mickey Harte will leave no stone unturned.

From Cormac McAnallen’s repositioning in 2003, to the rope-a-dope substitution of Peter Canavan against Kerry in 2005, to Stephen O’Neill’s retirement U-turn in 2008, McMahon was continually surprised by his manager’s ingenuity.

The big Omagh man was at the centre of Harte’s most memorable tactical gamble in the 2008 All-Ireland final when he was switched from attack to defence to pick up Tommy Walsh. It worked a treat and between Joe and his brother Justin, they held the ‘Twin Towers’ of Walsh and Kieran Donaghy to a solitary point that day.

It broke Kerry’s bid for three All-Irelands in a row and, on Sunday week, the feeling is that Harte needs to pull another rabbit from the hat.

In my own time involved I stopped trying to guess the teams,” said McMahon. “You had your own thoughts about who was going well but Mickey often felt there were other areas that you could impact a game.

“He took risks and he has options again now; whether he starts Lee Brennan, for example. Going back to the league campaign, playing against Dublin in Omagh, Lee Brennan in the first-half caused Dublin problems. There were spaces there and he exploited them. Dublin allowed that to happen until the second-half when they dropped two sweepers and that totally curtailed his threat.

“I imagine there will be a lot of analysis done by Mickey and the management team. Like what exactly?

“Well, I would say defensively, I would imagine Tyrone could push up and exploit the spaces Dublin create when they have their half-forward line pushing up, and their half-back line pushing up, there are definitely spaces there,” he said.

“There’s opportunities for the inside line to take their men on a bit more, draw fouls, or have the likes of Peter Harte and Tiernan McCann coming off the shoulder to exploit those spaces. Another option is Richie Donnelly at full-forward to play a few balls in with him as a target man.

Those are all strong options for Tyrone yet nothing that amounts to reinventing the wheel like McMahon’s big switch a decade ago to the last line of defence. That one caught even he by surprise and began with captain Brian Dooher pulling him aside before training: As I made my way out of the changing room he says, ‘Come here, I want to chat with you’,” recalled McMahon.

He pulled me into a changing room and there was Tony (Donnelly) and Mickey standing there. At that stage I thought, ‘I’m a gonner here, they could be sacrificing me if Stevie O’Neill is coming back into the forward line, maybe I’m going to be dropped.

“And then they asked me to go back and mark Tommy Walsh. As soon as I digested that I was thinking, ‘God, this is a completely new role for me here, full-back in an All-Ireland final, you’re going to be lining out beside your brother and you’ve a job to do’.”

- Joe McMahon was speaking at the launch of the Londis All-Ireland senior football 7s tournament, which takes place on Saturday week, September 1, at Kilmacud Crokes in Dublin.