Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher: Tyrone's joint chiefs of staff working as one

Feargal Logan only sees positives with sharing the Tyrone managerial role with Brian Dooher

SWEET ONE: Feargal Logan, right, and Brian Dooher celebrate after their upset win over Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final last month. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach, Sportsfile

It's often been the case in elite Gaelic football that two heads are not better than one.

Some have come close to debunking the theory.

Fifteen years ago, Mickey Moran and John Morrison reached an All-Ireland final with Mayo only to fall to Kerry.

Eleven years before that, it was Art McRory and Eugene McKenna coming up just shy against Dublin.

It was under the latter pair that Feargal Logan played in his one and only final, one that continues to gnaw at him.

“We will talk about that again,” he says through gritted teeth. “There are a few things in my football career I am not over.”

As a partner in Logan and Corry Solicitors and his co-manager Brian Dooher being the deputy chief veterinary officer for the department of agriculture in Northern Ireland, it’s unlikely either would have been able to do the job on their own.

“Woah, I can see how’s there two of us, put it that way. There’s plenty going on. The training sessions, Holmsey (Collie Holmes) Peter (Donnelly) and Joe (McMahon) are coaches and Des McGuinness.

“Brian and myself are involved, but how do we divvy it up? You can ask him independently, but it’s as close to a straight 50-50 on everything. Which has meant the phone, a Zoom every night. I have been in more contact with Brian than I have been with anybody in football.”

After being ruled out of the Ulster final due to Covid and confined to keeping in contact with Dooher from his sitting room, Logan soon realised that he had to take a backseat due to the few seconds of delay when watching the action on TV.

“My phone was beside me, and then I had the TV screen. The phone, I could hear the crowd and it still hadn’t happened on the TV. Then I was going, ‘shit, has that ball gone down their end, or our end?’ Joe (McMahon) mainly was operating it with Brian. The players were in good hands. I would have been better just putting my feet up at home, 100 miles away and relaxing. He divvied up all the subs that day.

“But I was talking to them, I was talking to them at half-time. We had an open WhatsApp call. It seemed to work and kept the line of contact to the guys, but you don’t know if you are doing right or wrong or adding benefit or not. But we got over the line, just about.”

How McRory and McKenna worked in tandem gave Logan an idea of how the job can be shared. “Art and Eugene were a brilliant management. Art McRory was a colossus of Tyrone football. Eugene was a colossus of a player. And I still would be in good touch with Art.

“It is a collective now. One, it is a fairly heavy shift and two, we have fairly busy jobs, Brian and myself. But it is a group. We are here tonight and there are guys sitting at home analysing videos, the medics who are working 24/7. It’s a collective.

“Management is overstated. You are as good as your players but you are also as good as the collective. Peter (Canavan), Brian and myself managed the U21s. I mean it sincerely when I say it didn’t cost me one iota of thought, really, because as a team and a panel, you rise together and you fall together.

“If (kitman) Mickey Moynagh comes up with the best substitution, and I mean that with the greatest of respect, the longest and best servant of Tyrone football – if Mickey comes up with the winning formula, I am as happy as anybody.”

‘Gut’ is a word Logan repeats a few times throughout the interview. Intuition is what he trusts when he talks about how he wants the players to approach tomorrow’s final.

“To be honest, overall my gut would be to go at it, the same way we went after every other single game.

“Overall, that’s my gut. Of course, you would love to embrace it. You’d love the families there, the spirit of it. Maybe I am more nervous and anxious than Mickey (Harte) is with three All-Irelands under his belt. That’s not anything to Mickey there but my thinking is, ‘let’s get the head down and see if we can win this’, because I have been that soldier that came out the wrong end and it is not easily rectified.”

Keeping Tyrone at the top table is imperative. It may be a second All-Ireland appearance in four years but the bolded and underlined figure is 13 - the years since the Sam Maguire Cup crossed the river Blackwater into Aughnacloy.

“That was a challenge for Brian and myself and, whatever happens, we still have a bit to go, to make sure that the standards didn’t drop and things didn’t go. There are counties, some not that terribly far away, where things can drop and, all of a sudden, it gets harder, once you go down a division, or two. It takes the full endeavour of every club, and everybody associated with Tyrone GAA, to keep it where it is. It attracts a bit of adverse comment at times but we just want to be as good as we can be. We don’t mean any ill to anybody else, we just try our best.”