Tyrone's success built on solid Block

ALL-IRELAND SFC SEMI-FINAL CORK v TYRONE: KEITH DUGGANon how Tyrone's Conor Gormley excels in the task of prevention, of shutting down the brightest lights in Gaelic football

IT IS part of the Tyrone mythology now. In the last frantic minutes of the 2003 All-Ireland final when the reigning champions Armagh were pressing hard on their fiercest rivals, Conor Gormley seemed to materialise from nowhere to prevent Armagh’s Steven McDonnell from delivering one of the late, killer reprieves that were then the Armagh speciality.

At the other end of the field, Owen Mulligan would recall believing that it had to be a goal as soon as Tony McEntee supplied the pass to McDonnell because he knew that the number 13 did not miss, not from that range. He waited to hear the cheers and to see the scoreboard change from 0-11 to 0-8 to 0-11 to 1-8. “I had to look at the giant screen to see what had happened.”

It was, unquestionably, the moment that saved the day for Tyrone. Minutes later, they became All-Ireland senior champions for the first time and began in earnest a remarkable journey of triumph punctuated by setback and genuine sorrow, one that has not ended yet.

BUT FROM TIME to time the thought flits across all Tyrone minds. What if Gormley had not made that block? What if Armagh had levelled with a few minutes to go? Because in that instance, that Tyrone team were not yet the side they subsequently would become, the side who have become the chief tormentors of Kingdom football, the side who all other modern teams want to emulate.

Nothing was written in stone. When McDonnell took possession of the ball and set about doing what came most naturally to him – swivelling on his pivot shot, eyeing his target, falling calm and trusting his technique and his judgment and practice to steer the ball home – Tyrone had never won an All-Ireland. Many of these players had been swept aside by Eamonn O’Hara’s tour-de-force in a Sligo shirt the previous summer. Doubt, at some level, lingered. For all their underage success, Tyrone’s narrative at senior All-Ireland level was one of disappointment, sometimes close and crushing, sometimes just crushing. But it was about falling short.

So if Armagh, the wilful and imperious All-Ireland champions had broken Tyrone with a goal then, would the Red Hand men have been able to locate the necessary steel and poise to prevent Armagh pushing on? Armagh, at that point, were regarded as the model county, the team whose belief and endurance surpassed all others. Tyrone were the coming team, all right, but they had yet to bridge that huge, psychological gap between never having won the senior All-Ireland and having done so. It does not stretch the truth to suggest the Carrickmore man’s deployment of the most fundamental and under-rated defensive skill made the bridge safe for his team-mates to cross. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that had Gormley not been there, everything could have been different.

“It was just an incredible block,” praised the late Cormac McAnallen, the full back that day. “It was one of those heroic moments. McDonnell didn’t miss. Cormac just came from nowhere.”

THE CARRICKMORE GAA grounds is among the most evocative in the country, nestled in the lows of the greater Omagh countryside, with the decorative Nally Stand taking pride of place. Upstairs in the club house – a tearoom rather than a bar – hangs a large oil painting of Conor Gormley, wearing the green, white and gold of the club rather than the county. Such a studied tribute could seem contradictory given the player himself has always been no-nonsense and low key in his approach to games, a footballer who deflects attention away. But for whatever reasons, it does not look grandiose or inappropriate; rather, it is an honest representation of how Gormley is regarded in his own club.

“He is, first and foremost, a Carrickmore man,” acknowledges Tony Donnelly, the Tyrone selector and Mickey Harte’s sideline confidante. “This is someone who leads the club team on the field, he normally plays midfield for them and has achieved what he has achieved with Tyrone and who has managed the under-16 team for the past couple of years.

“They really acknowledge his achievement and his contribution. He was reared there and lives there still. Sometimes the prophet is not recognised in his own land but Conor is. His whole attitude has always been to just get on with it. That is how he approaches his game: he goes out and tries to lead by example. He is quiet and he is unassuming and when he does speak, because he doesn’t rant the whole time, there is a depth to what he says.”

Donnelly confirms Gormley’s intervention in that first All-Ireland final was regarded by Tyrone people as little short of divine. Shortly afterwards, he was nicknamed “The Block”, although Gormley’s character seems somehow resistant to the burden of having pundits and radiomen referring to him by anything other than his real name. A half-back in 2003, Gormley’s role in the Tyrone defence has since grown in both strategic importance and presence.

One of the interesting things about the Tyrone team is it is choc-a-block with disparate personalities. There is room for the terrier-like devilment and abrasiveness of Ryan McMenamin and the school-prefect demeanour of Seán Cavanagh. The blond and animated Owen Mulligan blends in perfectly with the diffident genius of Stephen O’Neill. Brian Dooher’s place in Gaelic football lore has already been cemented – the bionic man, one of the greats.

All of these players command attention. Gormley is frequently a less vivid presence but he is always in the background, always putting out fires with the minimal of fuss, sorting out rows, settling issues. He has quietly become the player without whom it is difficult to imagine this Tyrone team.

“Yeah, the unsung hero,” says Liam Bradley, whose Antrim team met Tyrone in the Ulster final in July. “He doesn’t hog the limelight and he is probably Tyrone’s most consistent player in that whether it is the McKenna Cup or the championship, he is out there doing his thing. They can play him anywhere, really, in the back division and even in midfield. He is a hard, robust kind of player and he reads the game very well. He might just lack that half yard of pace and that is why he has come to play the more central roles in defence.

“We knew he would probably pick up one of our stronger players, like Michael McCann in the Ulster final and he is suited to those kind of forwards. I would expect to see him on one of Cork’s big men this weekend, maybe Pearse O’Neill. But he is the kind of player that anyone would want on their team. People used to talk about Francie Bellew’s understated importance to Armagh and I think the same is true with Tyrone and Conor Gormley.”

ARMAGH FOOTBALL people must have bemoaned Bellew’s absence from the back three in early summer when Gormley himself drifted behind the full-back line and rattled home a rare goal that pushed the match incontrovertibly in Tyrone’s favour. He even managed to strip all glory from that cameo, head down as he moved back up field, a study in stoicism. Like all of the Tyrone players, he is assured on the ball and he does take the opportunity to break forward but it is the task of prevention, of shutting down the brightest lights in Gaelic football that he takes most seriously. He is not particularly tall, at 5ft 10ins and he generally wears an inscrutable expression on the football field and pretty much every referee in the country knows his innocent-schoolboy look by now.

Two years ago, when Meath and Tyrone met in the All-Ireland quarter-final, the decision was made to send Gormley over to shadow Stephen Bray, who had kicked three wonderful points and was showing for every ball, threatening to go to town. The duel that followed was a riveting aside to the match – which Meath won. It was as though Gormley and Bray had been fused into one, so tough and embittered were their battles for possession. Bray won his fair share but other times it seemed as if the Meath man had the ball and then Gormley closed in and somehow, by some sleight of hand, he came away with possession. Bray did not score again in the match.

“The greater need was there so Conor was switched over,” Donnelly acknowledges. “And it is true a lot of times, he is the go-to man if a forward is causing problems. He is prepared to do whatever, he doesn’t feel he has to have this central role the whole time. He played a totally different game this year against Derry covering the space in front of the two Bradleys and he snuffed out the threat there. He is a very intelligent player.”

Chris Lawn has spoken of his introduction to the last 20 minutes of the All-Ireland final of 2005. Lawn was a veteran of the hot season of 1995 when Tyrone lost narrowly in the All-Ireland final against Dublin. He owed nothing to the Red Hand cause and he has known plenty of bad days as well and placing him in the middle of a game of that magnitude was another show of faith by Mickey Harte. As the first ball fell from the sky towards Lawn, he heard someone say, “Attack it, attack it Chris. I’m covering your back.” It was Gormley. Lawn went for the ball, claimed it and went on to have a storming last 20 minutes.

“That is the kind of communicator Conor is,” Donnelly says. “He manages things around him and keeps players right and a lot of it goes unnoticed.”

GORMLEY IS NOT above off-days – he spent a notably uncomfortable hour last summer chasing Mayo’s Conor Mortimer around Croke Park. Mortimer seemed to have the pace and guile to wasp in and around Gormley’s vicinity without once getting swatted. “In the early part of the game, in particular, that was happening,” agrees Donnelly. “But I do think Conor came to grips. Also, Conor Mortimer is a very good forward and he was getting excellent supply in that first half. Things were happening further down the field that were causing that. But Conor is prepared to recognise there will be times when forwards will cause problems and he just keeps at it.”

The traditional term for a defender like Gormley would be along the lines of “an enforcer”. But what the Carrickmore man does for Tyrone is much more subtle and darker than that. Often, he is the point at which an opposition attack reaches the end of the line. Promising moves cease to be. One of the most familiar sights of this modern Tyrone team is of Gormley calmly emerging from a tangle of footballers with the ball, deliberating his next pass and often wearing the hang-dog expression, as if he privately regretted he could not allow the forwards to have their fun.

Flash back to that Sunday afternoon in September, 2003, when Tyrone had toppled Armagh and much more besides. Because of Tyrone’s history – political and sporting – that team had shifted much more beside. And it was not the prettiest of games. It revealed nothing of the intricacies and marvels that lay in their future All-Ireland wins. It was a low-scoring, nervous match on an All-Ireland final day that had never been so intensely local. Again and again, dressingroom conversation turned to that block. Eventually, Gormley was asked about it.

“I just had to get back in there,” he said. “That’s my job. I can’t really recall it. You don’t get a chance to think about it. But I got up and the ball was still there, Tony McEntee got it back across but we scrambled it across the line. Tough going.”

Since then, Gormley has won two more All-Ireland medals and two more All-Stars. Nothing he has done in those seasons has matched that block in terms of fame and electric drama. Instead, he has done the small, important things again and again. It was as if he used up his quotient for drama in that one act. But it was enough. It won’t be forgotten.