Harte knew there would be days like this

MICKEY HARTE is more guru than football manager. We know this from listening to the philosophical reactions of the Tyrone boss to great victories and crushing defeats over the past seven season.

Yesterday Harte felt compelled to dispel the notion of mourning after a sporting loss. No, he told us, life has provided this group with enough brutal lessons to ensure they can put this into perspective.

True, the dream of retaining an All-Ireland title has been ruined for at least two more years. This was their fundamental motivational tool in 2009. Now, they know that the decade may end with Kerry, statistically speaking anyway, marked as the dominant football county. It’s not easy to be the champions.

“When you are near the top of the hill and get knocked down it is difficult to take. Life is like that. We in Tyrone know that. Life has given us worse knocks than losing semi-finals and we have dealt with them, so we’ll deal with this too. We’ll be hurt. We’ll be annoyed. We’ll have many regrets by all means but they are only sporting regrets and ultimately in the real scheme of things it won’t be that crucial.”

A teary-eyed Ryan McMenamin touched upon the key element for Cork when asked to describe how good they really are. “They are a hungry team with a point to prove out here. Full of running, hard tackling as you’ve just seen.”

“Some days you meet teams that are better than you and we certainly did that today,” continued Harte. “I suppose for me the crucial score was the goal. Even though Cork were hungry for the game and looking sharp if we hadn’t conceded the goal I think there was still every chance that we could have kept in touch.”

This we also know to be true. When Tyrone are contesting down the home straight they tend to break the tape. Cork knew they needed to kill them off long before the finish.

“I suppose there will be days like that and I can’t fault our players for their effort. They played everything they knew but Cork had the game well sown up at that stage and were comfortable in letting us have the ball deep up the field, knowing they could make life difficult for us. We didn’t create any gilt-edged chances for ourselves and therefore it was always going to be difficult to pick away at the lead like we needed to.”

The initial loss of Seán Cavanagh to a bug yesterday morning will be viewed as crucial, but Harte admitted Cork seemed prepared for every angle. “It is easy to make these judgments and say we are not good enough and say we played under par, if you like, or not to our usual standards, but that’s often a lot to do with the opposition. You know it is not all your own fault. I mean, our players, the way they played today, would probably win a whole lot of matches because they wouldn’t have met as much resistance.

“Maybe we would have been able to create a whole lot more scores. So it is all about the opposition as well and the opposition today was superior. You have to say that that happens sometimes and we have to accept it.”

A salient moment seemed to arrive in the 55th minute when Harte called his 34-year-old captain Brian Dooher and defensive lynchpin Conor Gormley ashore simultaneously. Their replacements, Aidan Cassidy and Seán O’Neill, may have futures in the game but they are unknowns outside their own patch.

Cavanagh had already been introduced as the sweeper with the intention of drawing out the rigid Cork defence but when they refused to take the bait Harte pulled in his two bruised and ageing leaders.

“You try and freshen things up. I suppose you sit with the team and people say why didn’t you make some changes. That’s the gamble of sporting life; you make some changes and they work, you make others and they don’t work. Most of the time when you don’t win they are seen not to work. I don’t see it that way. I think sometimes they do work even when you don’t win. Sure, that’s life,” said Harte.

And what of referee John Bannon? “You know and I know we don’t talk about referees here,” said Harte. “All I’d say is the one thing I’d like to see in referees is consistent application. I’d like to see that consistency between referees as well. I don’t feel that I saw that today. I think that some of our play was penalised where many other days it wouldn’t be. People can make their own judgments on that.”