GAELIC GAMES: KEITH DUGGANprofiles Brian McGuigan, whose fingerprints have been all over the best of Tyrone football for almost a decade

TYRONE WERE just beginning to turn the screw against Roscommon when Brian McGuigan moved into the full-forward line. It was not the most dramatic positional switch ever witnessed in Gaelic games but for a few minutes it illuminated another dimension to the Tyrone attacking game.

McGuigan began to make darting runs wherever the chance presented itself and suddenly alarming space began to appear in Roscommon’s back division.

Those who had been at the Tyrone-Monaghan match on a sodden day in June might have recalled the threat McGuigan posed when he roamed around the front line and the splendid goal he scored in that match. And as Tyrone began to ease away from Roscommon, the thoughts turned to bigger days ahead.

If Tyrone are to claim a fourth All-Ireland title, they will have to beat Dublin tonight, Donegal in the All-Ireland semi-final and then either Kerry or Mayo in the All-Ireland final. It will require yet another audacious turn-back-the-clock routine from several of the Red Hand’s most proven performers and Brian McGuigan remains the key element of that orchestration.

He is rarely mentioned among the front rank of contemporary GAA players like Colm Cooper or Seán Cavanagh and you never see him endorsing this drink or flogging that piece of sports merchandise. But McGuigan’s fingerprints have been all over the best of Tyrone for almost a decade.

An All-Star performer in 2003, he was criminally overlooked for the 2005 team despite giving a master class of creative play in the All-Ireland final that year against Kerry. By 2008, after coming back from a broken leg followed by an appalling eye injury that threatened not just his sporting career but his quality of life, he was used more sparingly by Mickey Harte, who felt it more important that McGuigan finished a game than start it.

“His fingerprints have been all over the best of Tyrone for almost a decade,” says Mickey Donnelly, his manager at Ardboe.

“That has changed but it speaks for itself. Mickey Harte wanted Brian on the field for the closing phase of games. He played against Cork in 2009 and last year against Dublin when they lost so that statistic no longer applies.

“With regards to the club, given the fact that he is such a wonderful footballer, we play him wherever we can get the most out of him. Sometimes we play him inside, other times at six where he can just pull the strings and be an example to young players. He is not a stereotypical number 11. He played a lot of his football inside last week. He is someone that you want giving the final pass because he sees things others can’t see. He can thread the eye of a needle.

“The way the modern game has transpired, you could see him playing more in the inside line with Tyrone – particularly if it means he won’t have to spend his day tracking back on attacking half-backs.

“Because you want Brian giving that final pass. With Ardboe, he is someone that players look to as a comfort blanket: if Brian is there, we will be okay. We lost a county final in 2009 and Brian came in for a lot of criticism for his performance with Tyrone that year. But in the county final, he was just sublime.”

It was miraculous that McGuigan was playing football that year at all. He was beginning to return to football after a double leg break when he went to play a local match in Aghyaran in the summer of 2007. The incident came out of nothing.

“I remember kicking the ball and watching it in mid-air,” he said afterwards. “And out of the corner of my eye I can see this boy coming. That’s how late I was. I wasn’t really paying much attention but the next thing, bang. It wasn’t sore. But I remember going completely black. Just pure blind.”

From that moment on, McGuigan and his family were pitched into something of a nightmare. The injury was gruesome and the prognosis bleak: a detached retina, with a 50 per cent loss of vision the likely outcome. McGuigan had to go through several excruciating procedures and then lie as still as possible for over a month.

Through all that, there was little by way of explanation coming from the other club and his father, Frank, wrote letters to the local newspapers, outlining his son’s predicament. Through the autumn of 2007, the chances of seeing Brian McGuigan in a Tyrone shirt again seemed slim.

The injury was doubly freakish for Tyrone people who had been accustomed to seeing McGuigan hobble around the bench at Tyrone league games, his leg framed in a metal cage. That injury, sustained in a club game in April 2006, caused him to miss Tyrone’s entire season that year.

He had worked ferociously hard just to recover from that. But to overcome the damage to his eye took incredible mental fortitude as well as physical courage and bravery. It cost him two full championship seasons.

“I don’t want to give it a fluffy cloud dimension but Brian loves playing football for Ardboe and for Tyrone,” Donnelly says. “I suppose coming back from those injuries may have created some confidence issues because they would terminate most inter- county careers.”

Three years on, Donnelly has not noticed if the aftermath of the eye injury has affected McGuigan’s game, apart from a slight dislike of playing and training under the glare of spotlights. “But for Brian to have 80 per cent of the vision he had is still 200 per cent more than an awful lot of footballers could ever hope to have. His game revolves around the final pass.”

In 2005, McGuigan had spent the first six months of the year travelling in the Southern Hemisphere. When he came back, Tyrone were still an uncertain force. As a team, they were still attempting to recover some element of normality after the sudden, tragic death of Cormac McAnallen the year before.

McGuigan had just returned to the squad when Tyrone played Cavan in the first round and was not expected to feature. But Tyrone were labouring and in the second half, McGuigan was sent in and did enough to get the attacking machine working again. They lost the Ulster final to Armagh that year but – after a pulsating quarter-final replay against Dublin – avenged that loss in the semi-final.

Then came Kerry. Not only did McGuigan run the show, he hit three points from play in the final. After McGuigan was overlooked for an All-Star that year, his father decided to put his own award up for sale in protest at the absurdity of the decision.

“Well, his father is very proud of him,” Donnelly says. “His father was an iconic figure. The difference is Brian’s best years have been playing for a successful Tyrone team. Frank’s best years were probably spent in Philadelphia. But in terms of carrying the burden of their father’s reputation: three of the McGuigan boys (Frank, Brian and Tommy) have All-Ireland medals. The fourth, Shay, has a minor medal. They are not doing to badly in terms of handling the burden of expectation.”

He is not physically as strong as his father Frank was during his interrupted career of storming brilliance with Tyrone, not does he light up the scoreboard as frequently. But he has the rarest gift of making the players around him become better.

That happened when he was sent in to during the second half of the 2008 All-Ireland final. Consistency has not been Tyrone’s way: instead, they have come every so often with leftfield runs that have startled everyone. This evening, they face the point of no return in this year’s All-Ireland. If they can deliver one of those vintage Tyrone raids tonight, then they will be hard to stop.

Fresh names – Kyle Coney, Mark Donnelly and Seán O’Neill – are beginning to appear more frequently on the Tyrone team sheet. Tommy McGuigan has pushed hard to reclaim his starting place too.

Big-match players like Brian Dooher and Owen Mulligan are playing on rationed minutes. McGuigan made way for Stephen O’Neill late in the day against Tyrone. The entrance and exits of the other celebrated names will provide other fascinations. Through all this, the quiet man from Ardboe will go about his business, which, at its best, will ensure Tyrone will be desperately hard to stop.