Darragh Ó Sé: Tyrone’s awful defence of their All-Ireland will rankle for a long time

I have a fair bit of sympathy for the Tyrone footballers this week. The days after you go out of any championship are tough, regardless of who you are or what you’ve done.

But the days after you surrender your All-Ireland title have an added little cut in them. You’re the same people as you were before but something has changed.

All those people who patted Tyrone players on the back last September are nowhere to be seen now. In the week after you win an All-Ireland everybody wants in on it. Where is the team drinking? Sure they won’t mind us joining in. There are always pints flowing somewhere. Great time to be alive.

Different story when you go out the following year. There’s nobody asking the Tyrone players for selfies this week. Nobody looking to hang out with them. Most of them were probably back in work on Monday. No bank holiday up north, no good reason to go on the beer. The whole thing would have felt like a dead loss.

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Especially since it all went so bad so quickly. I was at their game against Kerry at the end of the league. They were after beating Mayo the previous week and they came to Killarney looking sharp and meaning business. I know Kerry were already in the league final but you can still usually tell when a team is getting itself into a good rhythm and finding a bit of fluency. Tyrone looked like they were coming together that day and were ready to defend their title. Little did we know that was as good as it was going to get for them.

So this week is going to sting. They’ll be asking themselves where it all went wrong. They’ll be annoyed at everything and everyone. The glow of the All-Ireland will be long gone, even though it was only nine months ago. Players will be cranky at management, cranky at teammates, cranky at supporters. Eventually, cranky at themselves.

We won our first All-Ireland with Kerry in 1997. We came back in 1998 and won Munster again but we lost to Kildare in the All-Ireland semi-final. That left a mark on us because we hadn’t seen it coming. Not that we had under-estimated Kildare but maybe more so that we had overestimated ourselves. Or, more to the point, we had been a bit too casual because we had Maurice Fitzgerald and on some level, we just figured that he would usually find a way.

Maurice played some good stuff in 1998 too but teams were more intent on targeting him by then and while he was well fit for anything that anyone threw at him, it took getting knocked out for the rest of us to realise that we weren’t pulling our weight. We were leaving too much to him. We gradually changed but it took us until we won it again in 2000 to make our peace with that ‘98 season.

That’s the question for Tyrone now. What will they have to make their peace with in the weeks and months and years ahead? What went so wrong that they gave up their All-Ireland title without landing a decent punch at any stage? Above all, what has to change?

I look at Tyrone’s season and the first thing that stands out is the seven lads who walked away after the All-Ireland. The thing that really struck me about those defections was that none of them was retirement age. You couldn’t look at Tiernan McCann or Mark Bradley or Lee Brennan or any of these lads and go, “Yeah, his race is run. He was on the go for years and now he finally got his All-Ireland. Good luck to him”.

And I’m talking here as someone who also walked away on the back of an All-Ireland win. In the winter of 2009, I weighed it up over and over whether I should hang on for another campaign. My circumstances were different in that I was 34 and I had been on the go for 15 years at senior level. But there was one thing that was absolutely the same – the lure of one more.

When you are defending All-Ireland champions, you have something the vast, vast majority of inter-county players don’t have. And by that, I don’t mean the medal. What I mean is you know every night you go training that you have a chance of winning it again. You are able to look around your dressing room and do that mental calculation. Can I trust him when we’re in the shit? What about him? And him? And him?

When you’re doing that in most inter-county dressing rooms, you run out of bodies very quickly. You start over-selling fellas to yourself in desperation. Maybe if this lad stays injury-free. Maybe if we switch that lad to full-forward. Maybe a couple of those young fellas can blow us out of the way and take it on themselves.

But when you’ve just won an All-Ireland, there’s no maybe about it. You know. You know that this group is capable of winning the whole thing. Whatever doubts you had about them have all melted away. It takes very little to convince yourself that there’s another one here for the taking.

When I was finishing up, everything sensible told me it was time to go. Physically, mentally, football-wise – all the pointers were aiming in one direction. The only thing that kept me wondering about it for any length of time was the lure of one more. That’s how powerful it is. It is heavy enough on one end of the scale to balance out so much of the stuff you’re not sure about on the other end.

That’s why I was surprised that so many of the Tyrone panel walked. I know all the arguments and explanations. I know they were all different men with different reasons for leaving. I know they didn’t get much game time in 2021 and probably saw very little chance of that changing in 2022.

But for fellas in their mid-to-late 20s, the lure of one more should have been strong enough to keep some of them in the fold at least. The fact that it wasn’t was the big warning sign for Tyrone. If you can’t keep your squad players happy, that eventually filters through to the first team. Unity isn’t just a buzzword. People have to feel like they’re all in this together. If they don’t feel it right after they’ve won the big one, it’s going to be hard to find when things go bad.

The other aspect that’s interesting to me here is the fact that ever since they started winning All-Irelands in 2003, Tyrone have always had trouble defending them. Last year was their fourth All-Ireland and they’ve never made it back to the final the following year in any of them.

In 2004, Cormac McAnallen died in February so you obviously can’t be taking that year as a fair indication of anything. But in 2006, they went out in a qualifier against Laois and in 2009 they lost to Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final. This time around, they’re gone before the June bank holiday.

Our theory on it when we were coming up against them was that they always poured so much of themselves into the All-Irelands they won that they found there wasn’t a lot left in the tank when they went again the following year. On a micro level, that mirrored the way they played a lot of the time.

I was often in games against Tyrone where they came out and absolutely emptied themselves into the 20-25 minutes after half-time. It was the most intense football I was ever involved in – for that period, they would do everything at a million miles an hour, blazing forward relentlessly and never giving you a second to breathe. It was sometimes a matter of hanging in there and waiting for them to wilt towards the end.

When they won their All-Irelands, a lot of their campaigns went along those lines. In 2008 especially, I think they played 10 games to win it. they were going back to the well and back to the well, time and time again. It’s very hard to keep that going the following year. You pick up injuries, you lose bodies, fellas find they can’t stick the mental pace of it indefinitely.

If you think about Tyrone’s campaign last year, maybe the mental toll of all the Covid stuff had a similar effect. They were out of the championship, to all intents and purposes. But they got a reprieve and three weeks later they were All-Ireland champions. The ups and downs of all that, the emotional roller-coaster of it – maybe that took more out of them than it looked.

But they’ve lost now and they won’t be going back-to-back. And this week, as they’re picking over the scabs of it all, they’ll know what everyone is saying about them. Already you hear people dismissing their win last year as a soft All-Ireland.

Sure didn’t Donegal have them beaten only for Michael Murphy missing a penalty and getting sent off? Didn’t they catch Kerry on the hop with all the Covid carry-on? And didn’t Mayo beat Dublin for them? Better again, didn’t Mayo lie down for them in the final?

That sort of thing is annoying too. In 1998 and 2001 and all the other years we didn’t manage to go back-to-back, we heard all about how lucky we had been to lift Sam the previous year. If you believed the half of it, you’d be sure that nobody has won more soft All-Irelands than Kerry. I don’t doubt that plenty of people think that. They haven’t been shy about telling me it down the years anyway.

But overall, my attitude has always been fairly relaxed on it. Call it a soft All-Ireland if you like, but nobody else was there to take it off us. Ye’re all welcome to win your soft All-Irelands anytime you please. They all count the same. And trust me, they’re all treasured the same.

In that Tyrone circle this week though, there’s a lot of hurting to be done. They were All-Ireland champions and they slipped out without playing like it or ever looking like they were going to. Until they come back and find a way to do it again, that will be something they have to carry.