FOR a fortnight leading into Saturday night’s game, the gates of Garvaghey had been locked to anyone that wasn’t the Tyrone footballers.
On training nights that Brian Dooher and the returning Feargal Logan - who everyone was glad to see back in the Red Hand changing room if not a visible presence on the sideline – held training, they schemed and laid plans to try and better their near miss in Celtic Park.
The bare face of a seven-point defeat would tell you they failed but this was an entirely different game. Tyrone have edged so much closer to their true selves in the last six weeks. At half-time, they trailed by just 0-10 to 0-9 and they were in that position courtesy of having a very different cut off the freshly minted Ulster champions.
But the harder they tried in the second half, the harder it got. They tried to be proactive but the more they pushed out, the more space it left Donegal with which to hurt them through runners like the sensationally quick Peadar Mogan.
“We just didn’t handle the hard running of Donegal coming at us in that second half, they broke lines and created scoring chances. They deservedly won it in the end up, they were the better team in that second half,” Dooher admitted as neatly as ever.
“They’re all good footballers across the field. They broke lines and overlapped on us. It makes it very hard defensively once you’ve two-v-one, or even one-v-one in the shooting zone.”
This was the ninth time in 12 championship games since Tyrone won the All-Ireland that Tyrone had lost the second half. This time it was by 0-11 to 0-5.
They’ve fared better in league games in that timeframe, winning the second half of games 11 times, losing nine and drawing once, and in Dooher’s mind there’s no overwhelming evidence of a worrying trend.
“I wouldn’t say, we’ve had good second halves and poor first halves equally, so I wouldn’t go that far. It wouldn’t be my read on it. Maybe it is, if we look at the stats, they might show that.
“We just didn’t cope with Donegal runners as well in the second half. First half, they got through a few times, probably we were lucky not to concede goals. Second half, they really came at us hard and we struggled with it a bit.”
None of the four U20s that joined up in the aftermath of their All-Ireland success were part of the 26-man squad for Ballybofey but Dooher expects that they’ll push hard ahead of a home game against Clare next weekend.
Captain Michael Rafferty, star forwards Eoin McElholm and Ronan Cassidy, and U20 Player of the Year Shea O’Hare will all be in contention for the Banner’s visit to Omagh.
Donegal will be widely expected to top Group Three from here and Dooher admits that his side are now setting their sights on a preliminary quarter-final.
“That’s realistically what you’re looking for. It’s good that we’ve a match next week again to get things back on track again, looking forward to Clare at home. No point feeling sorry for ourselves, we’ll dust ourselves down and take the learning from it, go again.”
