Tiernan McCann puts rufflegate behind him as Tyrone drive on

Tiernan McCann must have thought he was getting off lightly, until someone mentions his hair. It is immaculately groomed, shaved on the sides and the thick cropping on top combed neatly back, a bit like early Al Pacino.

It was this same hair which last summer nearly earned McCann an eight-week ban, after it was gentled “ruffled” by Monaghan’s Darren Hughes in Tyrone’s All-Ireland quarter-final. McCann fell to the ground as if scalped, the GAA then proposing the eight-week ban for discrediting the game.

That was overturned on appeal – and largely forgotten about too. Then Mayo’s Aidan O’Shea went to ground a few weeks back, with similar thespian qualities, and suddenly McCann’s act was revived, if only for comparisons.

“Yeah, it has been a while since it has been talked about,” says McCann, resisting any temptation to run his fingers through his hair. “The last couple of days it has been brought up again, the Aidan O’Shea thing saw it brought up, but I just really parked it and concentrated on myself. Hopefully people will be talking about football performances rather than what happened last year. I have just been concentrating on football performances since then.

“Obviously hindsight is a wonderful thing and we have all done stuff we would probably wished we hadn’t or done differently. That’s life, it is something I have had to learn from and move on.

“It was difficult though. My family were on holiday in Portugal at the time, while I was at home, so it was tough. But it made me stronger as a person, and I just had to concentrate on the next game really because it was just two weeks later and then, after the Kerry game, that was the year over.”

While not necessarily sympathising with O’Shea, McCann suggests players sometimes make rash decisions towards the end of close games like that.

Energy levels

“Well, 70 minutes into a game, and we all know how tough the Monaghan game was last year, you are not even thinking about things.

“Your fluids have gone, your energy levels are down, things happen that you can’t do anything about, and you just have to move on from it really. I’d hope people will talk about performances on the field rather than anything else really.”

On that note, Tyrone’s performance in Sunday’s Ulster final, the way they wore down Donegal to win a first title in six years, has certainly got people talking – particularly the way Tyrone finished out.

“Yeah, the whole day things weren’t going our way,” says McCann, speaking at the launch of the All-Ireland football series. “At half-time, there wasn’t that much talk. We knew ourselves we needed to step up. Losing Mattie [Donnelly] as well, sometimes that can galvanise the group.

“Mattie was just disappointed in himself. It was a bit like Ronaldo going off last week for Portugal, they just raised their game, and it was the same sort of thing for us. Now is the time to lift. And I thought a lot of boys did step up.

“Donegal kept chipping back at us, but we kept it going to the last second. Seán Cavanagh was like a man possessed in the second half. Some of the points were unbelievable. And Peter Harte’s one didn’t just drop over the post. It sailed over by 20, 30 yards, and that was a class feeling.

“And then Kieran McGeary coming off the bench, young lad, 21, 22, didn’t think twice about swinging it over too. At that stage, 13-11, we knew it then.”

Not for the first time this year, a Tyrone player credits fitness trainer Peter Donnelly for having “massive influence”.

All Blacks

“I can’t say enough about Peter. He’s awesome, always looking to learn, new ideas, like looking at the All Blacks, how they warm-up, activate things. It’s unique but it’s testament to him, it’s really standing to us.

“And I think the more games you play, the more confident you get, and I think that was fairly evident on Sunday, playing 74-75 minutes on a roasting hot day in Clones.

“If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. We played a lot of difficult games in Division Two, and in Ulster, but certainly beating Donegal will give us extra confidence.”

Then there’s Mickey Harte, who it seems has lost none of the power in his voice.

“It is just the way he talks. His voice gets through to everyone in the room. He talks so well, his vocabulary is amazing. And I know I keep coming back to this same word but he is so positive.

“Everything is about what we can do better. He would say, ‘if we were doing this again, what would we do differently to get a better result’, rather than, ‘Jeez lads, what are you doing lads? You shouldn’t have done that.’

“He is a great man and a father figure to everybody. We all look up to him and believe in what he is doing.

“But right now we’re just thinking about the quarter-final because it is going to be a massive challenge, whether it is Mayo, Westmeath or Cork.”