THE wall might only be half done when Michael O’Neill pops his head round the door.
“I’m away here,” says the 27-year-old plasterer from Ardboe.
“Are ye?” says the boss.
“Aye,” says Michael.
“Good luck,” says the boss.
“Right,” says Michael as he closes the door behind him.
It’s a good job the boss (Martin O’Neill, his dad) is a diehard Tyrone football man.
“I’m lucky I work with my oul fella,” says Michael with a smile.
“He lets me nip off an hour or half-an-hour earlier. It keeps things going. He’s the one that keeps that ship in command and going. I just kind of turn up, work hard, go to my training, go home and sleep and eat. That’s about the height of it.
“He’s a football man so he doesn’t mind. He finishes the walls and stuff so I just slip on and tear away. We’d share the load, but I’d say once four o’clock comes I give him the nod and I head on and he finishes up.”
THERE will have been a few early finishes over the last few weeks as O’Neill gets ready to start this season with Tyrone.
His last game in the red and white jersey was one of those classic match-ups you prepare for. Get the grass cut, walk the dog, get the dinner early, get settled in your favourite armchair, or in a good seat at the bar… Get everything done so that, by half-three, you can settle down and watch Tyrone and Kerry go at it in an All-Ireland quarter-final at Croke Park.
Disappointed Red Hand fans would have switched it off well before the finish.
190 days will have gone by since Tyrone were beaten out the Croke Park gates when they take the field against Donegal at Healy Park on Sunday. If erasing the memory of that 12-point hammering hasn’t focussed the minds of the players during the off-season, well they’re not really Tyrone players.
Michael O’Neill is a real Tyrone player, as committed as they come.
He wore the number 11 shirt throughout the All-Ireland-winning summer of ‘21 and was a piston in the Red Hand engine. He knew his role and was solid and mobile, flitting from the half-forward line back into defensive zones as a tenacious man-marker who used the ball well.
But, like the Tyrone team, he hasn’t really looked himself since.
It began with what he thought was a hamstring injury which an MRI scan identified as “pelvic bone swelling” which is obviously as painful as it sounds. After it had settled down an ankle injury meant he was on the sidelines for another spell.
“You are trying to run through it,” he says of that pelvic issue.
“You feel up at the top of the hamstring starting to hurt and you’re going: ‘Jesus, I’ve hurt my hamstring here’. Then you get the MRI and I can mind seeing it on the picture, just the right side of the pelvic bone being bright white and the left hand side just being smaller and black.
“It just showed that one side of my pelvic bone had been expanded and it just swoll in around that area.
“Sometimes it’s down to how hard you are pushing yourself.
“Everybody else is doing the same training as you, so it’s sometimes you just overshoot the runway. It’s never really from a team perspective - it’s always trying to fit in extras. Extra kicking and extra stuff.
“Like, you go and kick a ball for half-an-hour and you don’t realise that after training you are under fatigue and the damage you could be doing.
“You are doing that two or three nights a week and you put in all these extra sessions and the next thing you start to break down, so I suppose there is a load of science the S&C coaches and physios could tell you but most of it is just trying to push yourself a wee bit too hard sometimes.
“The bottom line was I was doing too much.”
For six months he was on the sidelines and he returned for Tyrone’s Ulster Championship with Monaghan last April. That six months out is a long time came crashing home when he was in the middle of Healy Park trying to keep the Farney forwards at bay.
Struggling, O’Neill was withdrawn in the second half.
“Missing that sort of football does have an effect on how you play because nothing replaces football, nothing replaces competitive football,” he says.
“I knew myself five or six months had an effect on how I was playing. The more games I got the more comfortable I got. I suppose the lesson in it is your best ability is availability. The more I stay on the pitch the more confident I will be with playing.”
At one point he feared he’d never get back to where he was but with a string of games behind him for Ardboe he says that, touch wood, the injuries are behind him now.
“I’m very confident,” he explains.
“There are stages there when you are going through them spells of injury and you don’t know how you’re going to get out of it. But good people around you, good physios around you, the right people talking in your ear, you kind of keep at it.”
HE never looked himself with Tyrone last year but the end of the county season meant he was able to concentrate on club football and he played game after game with no major issues.
Having worked hard, and worked smart, to regain full fitness he is now intent on reversing Tyrone’s fall from grace over the past two seasons and that 12-point loss to Kerry in Tralee has stuck in his craw since last July.
“You want to try and right the wrongs of that game,” he said.
“All we can do is prepare ourselves as best we can and mentally be ready for the game. The first half against Kerry we were within two or three points and we went in at half-time going: ‘Here, we have a real good shot at this’,” he says.
“Unfortunately, once Kerry came out they really put us to the blade. They blazed us in that 10 minutes. The score went from two to four to six and ultimately started to get out of our reach and then we had to go chasing.
“And once we went chasing it became harder and harder and harder and they started to get into a real good flow and got a goal or two and it did come into a bit of a hammering at the end. But look, we didn’t turn up in the second half and that was ultimately what really bit us.”
So the only way is up from that low point. O’Neill says the players have worked hard and bonded well since their All-Ireland year but momentum has been missing. One good score has been followed by two wides, then a good first half by a disjointed second period.
Tyrone need to recapture consistency to have success this season.
“For the group of lads, for the panel, we thought that we prepared well all year and we trained well all year,” said 27-year-old O’Neill.
“Our performances were just a bit inconsistent at times and if we are looking to progress we need to start pulling out more consistent performances over the stretch of the whole year.
“I’s not nice to bow out of a quarter-final and you would like to be getting further. As a team we bonded very well, we trained very well and we were happy with how we did that.
“Going into next year it’s just: Can we make this a wee bit more inconsistent? We’ll knuckle down and get a good block of work done and hopefully get a good run of games and get stuck into it. It’s the only thing for it really.”
Totemic defender Ronan McNamee has called time on his career and leaves “a huge void” says O’Neill because the 2019 Allstar is a warrior who was born for battle.
“There is no better man to go to war with really than Ronan,” he said.
“He will be a loss, but look, it’s up to new people coming in and some of the men who have been around the squad three or four years, it’s a real good chance to shine and come through and hopefully try and replace what he brought to us but it definitely will not be easily replaced.”
The new faces in the squad include Loughmacrory’s Aodhan Donaghy, Tarlach Quinn (Moortown), Cormac Donnelly (Galbally), Lorcan McGarrity (Carrickmore), Conor McAneney (Glenelly) and Coalisland’s Tiernan Quinn.
Everybody is ready to rumble.
“Men have come off the back off their club seasons and you get that number of weeks off where you are by yourself and trying to get yourself back into tip top shape so once you hit Garvaghey and up to Tyrone you are ready to go,” says O’Neill.
“Training has shown that men are eager. They are really excited, even for the McKenna Cup.
“This is their chance to put their hand up and the intensity has been through the roof and hopefully it continues that way.
“That is what the fresh blood does for you. They give you that bit of fresh air and they really push things. They always work that wee bit harder so the workrate is through the roof.”
The new faces have to push the established stars and Tyrone fans will hope that promising players like midfielder Joe Oguz and his Errigal Ciaran clubmate Ruairi Canavan continue to flourish in the county jersey.
“Big Joe is a freak athlete,” says O’Neill.
“He is brilliant to play with - he gives you that freak athleticism that he has in how he moves and he works hard for the team and then Ruairi’s bit of flair... He just keeps you on your toes constantly - I have sore groins over the head of it, that’s the truth. He’s turned me, he’s turned my head in training and he’s very hard to handle especially in tight quarters where the rest of us maybe aren’t as nifty. He is nifty.
“The two of them are very humble young lads. They love to work - there’s not too many times the two of them are off the pitch. They love training, they love football.
“Losing Ronan is definitely a big hit and even with Mattie (Donnelly) being out with his injury and his knee, that’s another figure that you mightn’t have there for the next couple of months.
“But the boys that played came in last year out of the U20s are another year older and they have that Championship experience and you can see that in how they train.
“They come with a wee bit more maturity when they land at training. They know what they have to do, they know the standard that has to be set.”
He hopes Tyrone find the form that has eluded them over the past two seasons.
His oul fella won’t mind if he has to finish up by himself until the end of July...