The Tyrone question: Inside the team, the people who are so hungry to upset the consensus

They are Gaelic football’s Outsiders. They are used to it and feed off it. Ever since the O’Neill’s lost the Nine Years War, Tyrone has been the most anti-establishment county of them all. Declan Bogue examines their sense of themselves and their place in the world

AT ONE: Tyrone's finest take to the field at Croke Park. Picture: Morgan Treacy, Inpho

“ …it is a county of the interior, very much a law unto itself. It touches no sea shore, nor has it a great waterway like Fermanagh’s Lough Erne to have made it a highway in the past. Words like ‘self-contained’, ‘remote’, ‘withdrawn’, ‘secretive’, express something of this quality, which often took (and still takes) the form of doing things in unexpected ways, a characteristic we see from the earliest times … the ancient Gaelic customs lingered longest here, naturally enough …”

— Mary Rogers, ‘Prospect of Tyrone’, 1982.