IF THERE is one lesson all the great pretenders out there can learn from Tyrone’s latest All-Ireland coup, it is surely that in order to win you must play the game without fear.

The willingness of the Tyrone full backs to leave their men in order to attack the ball was one of the most absorbing features of the All-Ireland final. It is true many of the passes the Kerry outfield men directed towards their marksmen were bafflingly wayward and noticeably rushed but nonetheless, it took incredible nerve to dash out leaving footballers of the quality of Colm Cooper and Kieran Donaghy with absolutely no policing.

And there were times when the Tyrone backs came within a fingertip of misreading the bounce of the ball and of leaving themselves fatally exposed. It was a calculated gamble but, as the match wore on without Kerry breaching the Tyrone goal, the defenders grew in confidence and in stature. That 66th minute attack ought to have yielded what could have been the winning goal for Kerry but for Pascal McConnell making the save of his life. Still, it is somewhat startling to consider that Kerry, with one of its most vaunted forward lines ever, failed to score in the closing 14 minutes of an All-Ireland football final.

Two years ago, when Jack O’Connor had a Eureka moment and relaunched Kieran Donaghy as a retro-style full-forward, Kerry were a transformed team and, such was the impact of the affable Tralee man on the sport, it provoked a host of imitation switches across the land which resulted in limited success.

The reason moving Donaghy inside worked so well for Kerry is not purely because he is tall but because he is Donaghy; a big man with exceptionally quick hands, the vision of a quality centre-forward and a total team player.

Donaghy doesn’t care who gets the scores as long as Kerry get them. In fact, if one criticism can be made of Donaghy’s performances this year, it might be that he was not selfish enough. He will know from his time on the basketball court the cardinal rule is that you must keep defenders honest. If Donaghy is not at least looking at the posts, then it gives defenders one less worry.

Redeploying Seán Cavanagh was Mickey Harte’s belated nod to the sensational impact of the Donaghy factor. It was hardly an overnight success and Harte shipped a lot of criticism but he calmly and stoically stuck to his guns. But he did not simply direct the Moy man onto the edge of the big square with instructions to the others to lump the ball into him. Instead, Cavanagh roved with impunity, read the breaks and kicked his scores coming, at speed, off the shoulder of his team-mates.

Eoin Mulligan was about 20 seconds on the pitch when he set Cavanagh up with a brilliant little hand-pass. Cavanagh roamed like a man who knew he had the freedom to play anywhere. The same was true of Ryan McMenamin and Brian Dooher and even big Joe McMahon rode out into frontier country now and again, popping up at the extreme end of the Tyrone attacks. The Tyrone players moved with no fear of being caught out of position because they trusted their team-mates to cover their asses.

They trust each other. When Kevin Hughes came on the field, he almost immediately set-up the game’s only goal and then fired a truly spectacular wide. When he later managed to fist a wide from almost point-blank range, his afternoon might have turned sour. But none of the other Tyrone players admonished Hughes or looked particularly crestfallen at the missed opportunity. And so when Hughes played himself into a scoring position late in the match, he still trusted himself to take it on and delivered the score that took Tyrone three points clear.

When the Tyrone squad held its night for press and public in Carrickmore, the players were remarkably relaxed and actually seemed to be enjoying it all. Their attitude was a radical departure from the prevailing ethos that elite Gaelic football is a serious business with no place for smiling. The Tyrone boys were still smiling when they met President McAleese and when Tommy McGuigan got his goal, he was grinning like a kid.

They prepared for the All-Ireland final as though they had absolutely no doubts they would win and whatever tension they felt was confined to the 70 minutes on the field. With that sense of manifest destiny, their implicit trust in one another and their absolute comfort on the ball – Tyrone moving the ball from deep are a joy to watch – they were always going to be a tricky prospect for Kerry.

The bad news for all other managers is that there is no easy way to emulate the Tyrone model. There is nothing of the simple genius of the Donaghy factor. Tyrone have the work ethic of the Amish, for sure, but if anything, they are the ultimate proof that honest endeavour will only take you so far. At their best, they play bewilderingly smart football.

Of the long-shot contenders for 2009, Mayo and Donegal are the only counties who have a smoothness on the ball comparable to that of Tyrone’s but those teams are guilty of drastically over-complicating the fundamental business of putting the ball over the bar.

The likely candidates – Cork, Dublin, Galway, Armagh – still have to convince themselves, let alone the public, that they have the nerve to go out and live on their wits and play bravely, as Tyrone did.

Before this year’s championship, there was much heady talk that Kerry looked all but “unbeatable”. It was crazy stuff: Monaghan, Cork and Dublin all came within a score of beating the Kingdom last year. They were clearly beatable. They were just exceptionally difficult to beat and in those close matches, the aura of Kerry football mattered. Only Tyrone have mastered the trick of remaining immune to the power of that iconic jersey.

Next year, Kerry will still be the team to beat. The great thing about the Kingdom is, come the summer, they show up ready to play and they cope, year in and year out, with the burden of being perpetual favourites. The hope should be that Pat O’Shea stays on as manager and Darragh O Sé postpones the retirement party yet again and Paul Galvin turns over a new leaf and that Kerry come back intent on both redemption and retribution. Nothing would madden Kerry football people more than if Tyrone do one of their disappearing acts next season.

Putting back-to-back seasons together has proven difficult for Tyrone for all sorts of reasons and it remains to be seen if they still have “the feeling” when they begin to think about next year. The suspicion here is that they will do: like Kerry had this year, Tyrone have one eye on posterity now. The one hope for other managers is that September seems terribly far away. They have, at least, ample time to plot the downfall of the teams who gave us an All-Ireland final to remember.