Tyrone slump more apparent than real

On Gaelic Games:With the best will in the world you try to follow the early-season football form but still end up like an extra in a Keystone Cops comedy reel. A couple of wins here and it's off rushing down one road; a couple of defeats and it's back again and away in the opposite direction.

These feelings of futility are prompted by the haywire stats being rattled out by Tyrone. Every season there is inconsistency in the league and results no one saw coming but are yet unsurprising. Each week you have a sense there will be outcomes that go entirely against form. But short of having the physical training and conditioning schedules from every county on the desk, it's difficult to know who's doing what preparation and at what intensity.

Through all of these Rumsfeldian unknowns there have been a couple of fixed points in the universe: Kerry and Tyrone - you could throw in Mayo, who have tussled with the other two for qualification on the last day of regulation matches in each of the past two years, but their summer travails skew the equation.

The data on the correlation between National Football League progress and championship success is crystal clear, and in three of the four years Mickey Harte has completed in charge of Tyrone, they or Kerry achieved the once-elusive double.

Even two years ago Tyrone made sure to qualify for the semi-finals and from the rubble of a shock defeat by Wexford constructed a challenge that would deliver a second All-Ireland in three years.

This season Harte is squaring up against a third Kerry manager in Pat O'Shea, but there's no slackening in the All-Ireland champions' spring rhythms and albeit that their schedule this season is heavily back-loaded, they currently occupy one of the play-off positions and will have the Dr Crokes players available again after this weekend.

But Tyrone uncharacteristically have hit a speed bump. One of the reasons the county's loss of form attracts attention is that Harte's attitude to competitive fixtures is - well, competitive, as evidenced by his zealous pursuit of McKenna Cup excellence at a time of year when everyone else just wants to stay in bed.

If we take the model of All-Irelands alternating between themselves and Kerry, which has applied during Harte's tenure, it's Tyrone's turn this year.

Furthermore they started the season not only with a run of seven straight wins between the McKenna Cup and league but also in a whirl of experimentation, admittedly partly brought on a by a vast injury list, fielding a bewildering array of fit young ball players possessed of apparently limitless stamina and laser concentration.

The conclusion was that Harte had now uncovered a new generation of talent to slot into his system and once the injuries cleared up they would be all but unbeatable. So the sight of them being sequentially trimmed by Cork and Donegal has complicated the pleasingly simple narrative suggested by the opening weeks of the season.

By his own account, the Tyrone manager has a couple of abiding principles for navigating stormy waters. One, he is an optimist - a striking attribute given some of the awful misfortune that has befallen his teams; and two, he isn't easily moved to extremes and was as reluctant to buy into the hosannas being lavished on him after winning seven matches as he is now to plummet into despair after losing two.

And he's right. There were mitigating factors last Saturday. Although the injury crisis is gradually easing, the team was still short Joe McMahon, Philip Jordan, Seán Cavanagh, Brian McGuigan and Owen Mulligan - in other words, a third of a team and a pretty influential third at that.

Still few could have anticipated how comprehensively the well-drilled system would break down. At times Brian Dooher, just back and somewhat rusty from serious injury himself and working hard as ever in his role as forager, back-up runner and linkman, looked as powerless as a maintenance engineer working with an engine that's falling to bits.

But it would be premature to dismiss the early promise of the Tyrone panel, because the most pressing mitigation is that a number of the players who might have been expected to get runs on a senior team with injuries still weakening selection options were involved with the under-21s in the curtain-raiser, also against Donegal.

It's unusual to have the under-21s and seniors playing on a double bill and it meant players like Damien McCaul, Cathal McCarron, Brendan Boggs, Raymond Mulgrew and Colm Cavanagh were all unavailable.

That particular cohort look promising, and Harte reckons they are the best under-21s since the teams he managed to back-to-back All-Irelands in 2000 and 2001 - a group that included 12 who would go on to start in senior All-Ireland triumphs.

Whether the current crop would have affected the result on Saturday is a matter of speculation, and this year won't necessarily see them graduate, but there will be places up for grabs in the coming championship.

It's early yet for championship purposes and Tyrone's two All-Ireland victories were both assisted by accomplished team-reshuffling on Harte's part, but he reckons at this remove there will probably be five newcomers to the championship side this year. In the two years between the county's All-Irelands the Tyrone starting line-ups show six changes so the above projection isn't outlandish.

There have to be concerns that the team has played so badly in successive matches. Harte didn't know whether he had suffered successive league defeats previously in his management but actually he has - just once, but only a year ago, when Tyrone started the campaign with two defeats: the infamous opener against Dublin in Omagh and a surprising loss to Fermanagh.

There is also the still-to-be-exorcised ghost of Peter Canavan's retirement, the effect of which was never really calculable in last year's injury crises.

Nonetheless the fact is that when the panel is at full strength it will be the strongest in the country, with only Kerry at a similar level.

That combined with plenty of All-Ireland winning experience isn't a bad hand to hold in the long term, regardless of temporary difficulties.