How Kieran McGeary went from 'borderline mediocre Tyrone footballer' to All-Ireland champion

All-Ireland winner McGeary felt he had reached a crossroads in his football career

Kieran McGeary of Tyrone with his PwC GAA/GPA Footballer of the Year award for 2021 at RTÉ Studios in Dublin. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Kieran McGeary admits he regarded himself as “a borderline mediocre Tyrone senior footballer” before this past season.

Crowned PwC footballer of the year by his peers last week, the All-Ireland winner felt he had reached a crossroads in his football career.

Opening up his thought process before the start of the season, he said: “I suppose the fact I am there since 2016 and this is now 2021 and I am looking back and going, ‘Right, what has he done here? What have you achieved? You wanted to be in the Tyrone seniors. You got yourself to one All-Ireland final, got beat. You have a couple of Ulster medals. What have you done individually? What have you done collectively since I’ve joined the panel?’ 

“Look, there’s a lot of the boys have been successful and they deserve every single bit of it, but for myself, I was just sort of borderline, mediocre Tyrone senior footballer. Why was I driving to Garvaghey three or four nights a week and changing my whole life for no success? I suppose this year I really thought, ‘Right, here, kick yourself into gear man and get going.’ There were a lot of things this year that perhaps didn’t go right, but kept going, kept going with the same mindset that we could win and achieve.” 

McGeary’s transformation was based more on an internal conversation than with managers Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan. “A few times I would have said to myself, ‘Right, there’s another season gone, got nowhere.’ 

“I’ll never forget last year, throughout the Covid lockdown - we played Donegal in Ballybofey on a wet, wet day and I don’t think the camera could even see the football, never mind me. Came off again, that was it. First round of the Championship. No back door. League was finished, heading into a wet November, wet Christmas, probably with nothing to look back on.

“Wee moments like that hit home real quick. You’ve been here long enough. There’s six gone. What’s to say you’ll get the next six as a playing member? What’s to say you’ll get the next six at all, even being there in the set-up? It was time I got myself into gear.” 

When he was benched at half-time in the Ulster quarter-final against Cavan this year having been booked early, it appeared the Pomeroy man was under pressure again until he had a chat with team-mate Tiernan McCann.

“It was my downfall in the game probably because I was being a wee bit over-aggressive. It is never a bad thing to have a bit of aggression, but I suppose it’s being able to cap it at the right times.

“Got hooked at half-time against Cavan because I got a yellow card. Definitely the right decision by Brian and Feargal. I have absolutely no qualms about it. After that day I was sort of chatting to him and he (McCann) just said something very simple that never even dawned on me before.

“You should go out for the first half of the game really imagining that you are on a yellow card already, so the next tackle will have you sent off, so you have to be extra particular about it.

“It’s actually a piece of advice that I took on board massively that year. Every single game after it - the Donegal game after it I got a black, something similar, last minute of the game, but it was definitely advice I took on board.” 

McGeary admits the 16-point trouncing they suffered at the hands of Kerry in Fitzgerald Stadium last June was a long time coming.

“It’s very easy now for everybody to look back and say, ‘Killarney was the kick up the backside they needed.’ But it’s only a kick up the backside if you make it a kick up the backside.

“It’s very easy to use those words but what went on after that… trusting the process. What we did that day in Kerry was probably needed for a long time.

“We went 15-on-15 and tried to play football with one of the best footballing teams ever. We lost the game and lost miserably. We tried things that didn’t work. We tried to go individually to win the game; play for play, ball for ball. We got ourselves handed to us.

“After that, it would have been very easy to revert to a defensive style of play, dropping behind the ball. But after that, the exposure we had to one v ones in training, was incredible.

“It was one of those ones, you keep on being uncomfortable in a situation until you’re comfortable with it. That day, every single one of us got beat.

“I know it was chalk and cheese to the final. Mayo are very similar to Kerry, two amazing football teams. Probably what was done on the coaching field; one-on-one exposure, trust in the process. Things that needed to change. We had the footballers to do it. We just needed to be able to show youse that we can.”