Mickey Harte’s new-look Tyrone set for ultimate stress test

"Like all of these things, are you as good as your next game?" asks Mickey Harte. "And we haven't played it yet."

Which is the neatest and simplest way of addressing Sunday’s All-Ireland football semi-final against Kerry, because for all the progress and furore that has gone before, Harte can only see it that way: Tyrone’s next game.

Indeed having already addressed that little furore – particularly Tiernan McCann’s “Rufflegate” affair – the Tyrone manager is naturally more concerned about the progress his team has made.

Sunday's game comes exactly 15 weeks since they lost to Donegal in the Ulster preliminary round, and now, after beating Limerick, Meath, Tipperary, Sligo and Monaghan, it is Kerry who are up next.

“When you’re in the last four of the All-Ireland, you have to be happy to get to that stage,” says Harte. “It isn’t easy to get there. Now we’ve got there and I do believe we have a decent team.

“We’re still a work in progress. This gets harder from here on in, so we’re not hanging our hats on this. We’re saying it’s a good job, well done so far. But the bigger tests are ahead. And obviously one of the major ones we know we have is against Kerry.”

Onslaught

That’s partly because Harte knows Kerry so well. Beginning with the onslaught of the 2003 All-Ireland semi-final, then the 2005 and 2008 All-Ireland finals, most of Harte’s finest hours came against Kerry.

“It’s always good to play Kerry. They are the best. They have the best record of any team since the GAA was founded. They didn’t get that by accident. They are the team that everybody raises their game for. That’s what they have to live with always. So yes, it’s a good thing for us that we’re in the semi-final. But whoever the opponents might be wouldn’t be easy anyway.

“But of late, in the last 10 or 12 years, Tyrone and Kerry has become sort of a game with added value, if you like. We have been fortunate in the 2000s to have gotten the rub of the green when it mattered most. In 2005 and 2008, maybe we were not as big underdogs, as we are just now. We probably were in ’03 because there was probably a bit of a surprise element to what we were coming with then.

“That surprise element evaporated in ’05 and ’08. They’d have still been favourites but we were closer to the mark. But I do believe that we are out there as a bit of an underdog again and we have to see if we can cope with that. Because since the 2008 victory, Kerry have certainly got the upper hand. We have to raise our bar to a new level if we’re going to compete with them. We won’t know until we face that challenge whether we can raise ourselves to that level or not. But we have to endeavour to do that.”

Emotional evening

The last championship meeting, in the 2012 qualifiers, turned into a particularly emotional evening in Killarney, not just for the way Kerry turned the rivalry in their favour, but also for the respect they showed Tyrone after doing so.

“It was one of those landmark times. There were a few other times as well that we shipped a bit of a beating that wouldn’t have been par for the course in the previous eight or 10 years. I suppose there was a transition in our team at the time. A lot of the men that had soldiered well for us for a lot of years were getting to the end of their career. It was a question of, maybe there wasn’t enough good young players ready to take their place.

“We had to balance that a bit and maybe that’s what took a little bit more time to arrive close to where we are now. It’s all in the name of the game to make that transition from keeping as many of the experienced players as you can, as long as it fits in with the strategy you want to play.

Majority

“It’s not easy to play the modern game with men in their 30s. You can handle a few of them, but you can’t have the majority of them.”

Yet given Harte was by then in his 10th season as Tyrone manager (he’s now in season 13) was he ever tempted to step aside?

“No, I never had that temptation. I love a challenge. I think this was a great challenge, to try to do something after a group of real quality players had gone through the system. I definitely believe we can win an All-Ireland. I believe we can win, and that makes it possible.”