'I was telling myself I was okay, but I knew I wasn’t': How Tyrone defied Covid chaos as defeat changed Kerry's course

THE sound of silence caught the breeze as soon as Monday morning’s draw was made, flowing freely from the wild Atlantic way in the south-west right up and across towards the shores of Lough Neagh.

Jack O’Connor had a press gig already arranged for Tralee that evening, the Kerry boss tossing forth a few token lines about the challenge ahead pretty much the height of pre-match murmurings lacking in their usual menace or mischief.

Words have been either watched or not uttered at all, Kingdom jungle drums packed away while hush took hold in Tyrone.

Tickets, traffic, parking, hotels for those boasting budgets of Tubridyan proportions, these are the conversations that dominated the agenda as the swift turnaround to 3.45pm on Saturday sparked supporters into action of a practical kind, mouth-foaming passion reserved for throw-in.

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The contrast between now and August 2021 could hardly be more stark.

That it is less than two years since such an extraordinary saga simultaneously straddled the sporting and non-sporting spheres feels barely believable, front and back pages filled daily as an unfolding drama played out in the most public, often pernicious manner.

Revisiting the scene is like delving into some kind of dystopian nightmare – tented testing centres, men and women in white suits, vaccination, quarantine, social distancing, swabs, self-isolation, mutations, variants, all terms that had so forcibly become part of everyday life, largely gone without trace since.

This was a Championship summer like no other, a Kubrick-esque chapter in a bitter rivalry that stretched far beyond comparatively inconsequential comments about puke football and everything else that saw Tyrone and Kerry captivate a nation for so much of the Noughties.

An All-Ireland semi-final originally due to take place on August 15, then rescheduled for six days later was eventually played on August 28 in front of just 24,000 people against a backdrop of social media scrutiny and innuendo as Covid ripped through the Red Hand ranks, fault lines of opinion firing off in all directions.

Yet after heading down to Dublin as huge outsiders, Tyrone – in the first year of the post-Mickey Harte era - travelled back up the road with one hand on Sam after an exhausting, exhilarating extra-time encounter, leaving Pat Spillane and Sean Cavanagh to fight the bit out from two metres apart while Kerry wondered what had just happened.

For a county so proud of its past, this was a day that would significantly shape its immediate future.

Down below The Sunday Game’s Croke Park perch, the last word belonged to a glistening Kieran McGeary, RTE's man-of-the-match catching his breath before summing up one of the greatest feats of Tyroneness in typically defiant fashion.

“They said that we wouldn’t…

They said that we couldn’t…

I tell you what, we did”

*******************

IMPRESSIVE second half showings against Cavan and Donegal had finally brought Tiernan McCann to where he wanted to be.

A staple of the Tyrone half-back line under Mickey Harte, injury earlier in the year made it more difficult to find a way in under the new men, Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher.

However, with an Ulster final against Monaghan looming, McCann was due to wear six as the provincial showpiece traded Clones for Croke Park to allow in a larger crowd under Covid restrictions.

But then, on the Monday before came a minor case of the sniffles. By Tuesday it was marginally worse. Of greater concern, though, were the readings on his Whoop wristband, which monitors sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, skin temperature and blood oxygen levels around the clock.

“A lot of my readings were in the red,” he recalls, “my heart rate, my respiratory rate, they were really up. And that came before the symptoms even showed.”

Nobody was allowed to enter Garvaghey without a negative test. McCann remained at home on Tuesday, hoping to have improved by Thursday, aware at all times that the final on Saturday was rapidly approaching.

Met at the gates by the Tyrone doctors, he registered a positive test. Then another. Then another.

“I probably failed four or five in-a-row… I just refused to believe it.

“But every single one had a line, so I had to go back home.”

Between contracting the virus and close contacts, Tyrone had already lost Rory Brennan, Frank Burns, Richie Donnelly and joint manager Logan. A failed PCR test on Friday would signal the end of McCann’s Ulster final ambitions too.

That morning he went down to Killyclogher’s pitch with a bag of balls and started to run about, praying everything was okay. Before long, shortness of breath set in. The PCR would only confirm what he already knew.

“I was telling myself I was okay, but I knew I wasn’t. So I watched the Ulster final from home.

“It was… surreal is the word. When it’s something you’re so close to but you’re so far from it. You’re not injured, it’s not debilitating at all, you just have this weird virus that feels like a flu or a cold.”

The Red Hands, having shuffled their defence, bringing Kieran McGeary back from 10, then introducing Mark Bradley and All-Ireland semi-final hero Conor McKenna from the start, held off a late Farney fightback to reign in the rain.

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It was then that the fun really started.

McCann returned to training once released from quarantine but, elsewhere, players were dropping like flies, the numbers arriving at Garvaghey dwindling by the day.

From outside, the finger was firmly pointed towards post-match celebrations once the team returned from Dublin with the Anglo-Celt. McCann wasn’t there, but Ben McDonnell was.

The Errigal Ciaran midfielder was one of the lucky few who managed to avoid the virus altogether and, while minutes had been hard to come by, claiming an Ulster medal was a landmark occasion.

No outsiders were present, no wives, no girlfriends, no family members and certainly none of those isolating. On safety grounds, some of those involved earlier in the day opted not to go.

In an interview with The Irish Times, goalkeeper Niall Morgan insisted “you wouldn’t have had any more than half the panel there, having a few beers together”.

“We still had a relatively new team so winning that Ulster – it was my first Ulster medal – it was definitely something to be celebrated,” said McDonnell.

“We didn’t regret that.”

Back at base, protocols were still being observed as chaos took hold.

The changing rooms at Garvaghey had long been out of bounds, the squad changing at the kids’ play area on the basis that it was a softer surface than the car park.

Across the stand stretched a huge piece of canvas, hanging down like a curtain to allow physios to work without getting drenched when the Irish summer decided to act up.

Even on the way to Dublin for the Ulster final, all parties drove separately before parking up at Clontarf Castle where they split up into two buses for the short trip to Croke Park.

As McDonnell recalls, the only other times the Tyrone players had been together in confined spaces that summer was in Championship changing rooms. Somewhere along the line, though, the damage had been done.

At its height, 17 members of the panel were unable to attend training, with coaches Joe McMahon and Peter Donnelly having to make up the numbers during pitch sessions.

“There would usually have been 35-plus,” says McCann, “then it was more like 17, 18.

“We didn’t even have enough for an in-house game, so you were doing backs against forwards, different drills. You’d be getting to training and somebody else wasn’t there, then you wouldn’t see them for a week - that type of thing was going on every night, and the game was getting closer and closer.”

On August 8, eight days after the Ulster final, the Tyrone County Board requested a two-week postponement of the semi-final. The following day, the GAA confirmed it would push the game back six days.

This wasn’t enough for the Red Hands. On the morning of Saturday, August 14 those players available gathered out on the field in Garvaghey. Brian Dooher explained that, upon medical advice, Tyrone were pulling out of the 2021 All-Ireland Championship. Numbers were already low, with the fear that more could follow.

“There was a bit of a debate,” says McDonnell, “there were boys saying we’ve been training for this all year, we can’t just lay down, we can beat them with the 15 or 20 boys we have.”

Then Darren McCurry spoke up.

The Edendork man doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke and, having opted off the panel when Tyrone reached the 2018 All-Ireland final, was now playing the football of his life.

One of the quieter members of the panel, what he said stopped everybody in their tracks.

“If somebody drops on this pitch, who's to blame?” 

“That was the end of any argument,” says McCann.

“Darren wouldn’t really say a whole lot, but those words really hit home because that’s how serious it was at the time.

“It might seem silly looking back now, but it was such an unknown. People might have thought Tyrone were being cute, being shrewd, but that wasn’t the case.

“You think back to the tragedies Tyrone have suffered, we were in a position here to have control over what we were going to do. In that moment, Darren’s words really resonated with everybody.”

The die was cast and, with Kerry’s acquiescence, the GAA granted a further one-week postponement, pushing the game back to August 28 - 13 days after its original date. The ill wind that blew in their direction came as no surprise to McDonnell.

“We heard it all… we’re still hearing it nearly two years later,” he smiled.

“It always seems to be the teams from the north, and Tyrone in particular, that when things like that happen it doesn’t look too good online. You see ones commenting, saying they’re doing this in badness, but we knew in the camp we had to make a call.”

Yet while some in the Kingdom were more concerned with whether this particular All-Ireland would merit parity with the other 37, Tyrone arrived at Croke Park emboldened by events and the widespread suspicion that a hammering could be headed their way.

After all, 11 weeks earlier they had left Killarney with tails between their legs after a 6-15 to 1-14 humbling in the National League semi-final. Management had been bullish about going man to man in the days before; what transpired ultimately transformed Tyrone’s year.

Three weeks of relentless running around Garvaghey followed. Those sessions are burned into Tiernan McCann’s memory. Defensive alterations were fine-tuned through Ulster, momentum hard earned as wins over defending champions Cavan, bogeymen Donegal and Monaghan sharpened steel while Kerry coasted beyond Tipperary and Cork.

The Kingdom were kept in cold storage for five weeks between that Munster decider against the Rebels and the All-Ireland semi-final. When Tyrone played a full A v B game at training on the Tuesday night before, it was their first in almost six weeks.

Yet, tactically, the plan of attack was being drilled home as soon as things started to settle, the nuts and bolts of which was to suck Kerry in and bomb the ball long, making sure plenty of bodies got on breaks around the twin towers of Conn Kilpatrick and Brian Kennedy.

When the revenge mission rolled around at last, Tyrone had no doubts.

“I remember Niall Kelly, a best mate of mine from Errigal, texted me the night before the game,” says McDonnell.

“He was asking what the mood was like… it’s weird, but I remember looking around the room and there wasn’t one man that doubted we were going to win.

“It was a perfect situation for Tyrone. Kerry beat us by 16 points in the League, then mentally they had it in their heads probably ‘these boys will not be fit for this’.

“We knew that was the situation, we knew we had to be better. And we were.”

The game hung on so many moments and the finest of margins – the disallowed Stephen O’Brien goal, Peter Harte’s block on Killian Spillane, Niall Morgan’s raking free from somewhere near Drogheda, Conor McKenna’s big-game magic, the failure of David Clifford to reappear for extra-time and many more.

But Tyrone would not be denied. Two weeks later they trumped Mayo to claim All-Ireland number four, even if a heavily sanitised Sam Maguire was held in Covid custody before making its way up the road.

McDonnell, currently spending the summer painting and playing for McAnespie’s in Boston, was a late sub for Kennedy that day while McCann saw only the dying seconds after his 73rd minute introduction.

The Killyclogher man was one of those who walked away from the county scene once the dust settled on an unforgettable year – the manner in which playing possibilities were taken from him leaving a bitter taste until perspective took hold.

“You just kinda learn to accept it.

“I kinda knew after the Kerry game there was no man going to get in… really the Monaghan game was my opportunity, and that was taken away from me.

“I did everything in my power to get in and something out of my control stopped that. Ultimately Tyrone won their fourth All-Ireland and that’s what people will remember…”

Down in the Kingdom, meanwhile, the inquisition was already well under way, eager eyes awaiting the white smoke that would signal Jack O’Connor’s third coming while Peter Keane reluctantly slipped into the shadows.

Galbally man Paddy Tally, once an integral part of Mickey Harte’s backroom team, was on O’Connor’s ticket. Jack doesn’t do near misses or what-might-have-beens. The hurt he found was matched only by the hunger; he couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

By the following July, Kerry were crowned All-Ireland champions once more. On Saturday, their title defence steps up a grade in all-too-familiar company.

*******************

“Of course, there is an allure there. Who doesn’t want to coach Man United? There is that allure because of the tradition”

Jack O’Connor, Irish Examiner football podcast [ITALICS]

August 30, 2021

THE bones were still being picked from the wreckage of Kerry’s exit when Jack O’Connor acknowledged the appeal of returning to the post he had most recently vacated in 2012.

Whether by accident or design, he has since claimed it was “naïve” to make such comments publicly, the wheels were already in motion for the man who led Kerry to All-Ireland titles in 2004, ’06 and ’09.

The most telling of the comments made in that Examiner podcast, however, related to the failure of the Kingdom’s tactical plan in defeat to Tyrone – what they lacked in the middle third, their passive defending once Tyrone broke the press and how, to give a “pivot” outlet for kicks from the half-forward line, Sean O’Shea would have to be restored to his most natural position of centre-forward, with one or two more “workmanlike” forwards required to flank him.

If it was an audition, it proved a successful one. O’Connor – who had also interviewed for the post when Peter Keane got the gig in 2018 - stood down from Kildare and was appointed Kerry manager three weeks later, on September 24.

A potential partnership with Tally may already have been in the works had he remained with the Lilywhites, but everything that has happened since, and the evolution in Kerry’s play, is a consequence of what happened in the 2021 All-Ireland semi-final.

“A lot of the approach Kerry took throughout the season in 2022 was a direct response to that defeat,” said former Kingdom boss Eamonn Fitzmaurice,

“The three goals, the manner that those goals were conceded in, informed the template that Kerry came with from the very first game of the McGrath Cup.

“The approach last year was very much a reaction to that game.”

And, having spent five years in the Kerry hot-seat, Fitzmaurice understands better than most the small margins that would ultimately end his successor’s reign.

“In any county, and particularly so in Kerry, it’s a results business.

“If you win the All-Ireland it’s going to buy you a few years, I imagine if Kerry had gone on and won the All-Ireland in 2021, Peter would probably still be in the job unless he decided in the meantime to step aside himself.

“It was tiny margins on the day - David Clifford having to go off was a huge factor. You lose a game by a point after extra-time, there’s always going to be a lot of regrets. Ultimately it cost Peter Keane his job.”

Now the opportunity to right the wrong awaits. That it was Tyrone who ended Kerry’s interest in 2021 is by the by, according to the Lixnaw man – “a lot of people think you should never lose a game to anyone; whoever beats you becomes public enemy number one”.

Twenty-two months on though, the stakes are undoubtedly raised because of what happened then; a score to be settled on a stage like no other.

“From a supporters’ point of view, they’re genuinely nervous because of the Tyrone factor,” said Fitzmaurice.

“I would imagine, within the playing group in particular, that they would feel it’s a huge opportunity to get back at Tyrone for the 2021 game because a lot of the lads would’ve played in the 2019 semi-final when they got the better of Tyrone, then Tyrone won in 2021 and went on and won an All-Ireland before a lot of our lads had. That hurt at the time.

“Look, rivalries are at their best when both teams are winning, and it isn’t just a case that it’s a traditional rivalry not living up to what it once was.

“With the Kerry-Tyrone rivalry, someone said to me this week, it’s four all in Championship games, so whoever wins will go ahead. That’s a genuine rivalry.”