If revenge is a dish best eaten cold, Derry in early February would strike you as a good place to start but Derry manager Mickey Harte dismissed the idea that there was anything loaded about his team’s convincing win over the manager’s own county of Tyrone, who he led to three All-Irelands before departing after 18 years.
“Well for some people it was but I don’t really live that way,” he said in answer to the question, had the Allianz League fixture been more than just a game.
“I just came along here today to manage Derry as I have done for the last four or five games. So it happens to be Tyrone who were the opposition.
“They have their own set-up. They are on their own journey. I am on this journey now. A lot of people make more of it than is necessary. I don’t see any big deal in it.”
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Aside from the melodrama, the Ulster champions put in an accomplished performance to stay on top of Division One with a second win from two matches. Despite having played with the wind in the first half, Derry changed ends leading by just three points, 0-8 to 0-5.
Any notion however that this margin might end up proving insufficient proved fanciful when Tyrone missed six scoring chances after half-time while Derry extended the lead by two.
Harte acknowledged that he expected a more challenging second half against the wind.
“Surprised maybe to a degree, but I think the point was we had a good history in recent games in doing well against breeze . . . but we didn’t feel in a great position with the slender lead we had. When we got the few scores to widen the gap, it certainly took the pressure off us.”
The match was closed out with a goal from Derry’s captain and man of the moment. Conor Glass has kept going since spearheading Glen to the All-Ireland club title two weeks ago. He scored a goal then and did so again yesterday to put the icing on the cake, having had a previous effort disallowed because the assist was out of play.
Harte played a straight bat when asked had his nephew Peter, the Tyrone captain, not played the match “on family orders”.
“I knew nothing about it anyway, I can tell you that! It was kept a pretty tight secret. I honestly didn’t know about it. It was news to me when he didn’t line out.”
There’s a week’s break now for the football league, which the Derry manager was keen to emphasis meant “no matches” rather than no activity. He has started both of his previous intercounty appointments with league title wins, in Tyrone and Louth. He doesn’t appear to have changed his thinking despite suggestions that the new calendar doesn’t really encourage league wins.
“I don’t really enter competitions to lose them, so we have to do our best. I’m not sure it’s as definitive as that – that if you do well in the league it wrecks your championship hopes. I never subscribed to that school of thought.”
After two rounds, just two counties are on full points. On Saturday evening, Mayo recorded a first league win over Dublin in Castlebar for 12 years. A tight encounter was swung at the end when Ryan O’Donoghue addressed a free and instead of kicking for the posts, transferred to Fergal Boland who calmly clipped the winner in the dying seconds.
The hurling league swung into action at the weekend and there were Division One wins for All-Ireland champions Limerick, Galway and Tipperary in 1B as well as Clare and Waterford in 1A. The sixth match was another high-excitement clash between Leinster rivals Kilkenny and Wexford, who have had some riveting encounters in the past few years.
The latest at UPMC Nowlan Park was no exception with the sides swapping late goals to register the day’s only draw in the top flight.
It appeared as if replacement Billy Drennan had won it for Kilkenny when his assist for Billy Ryan ended in a penalty, which Drennan converted for the second time in the match.
Almost immediately, Wexford hit back, conjuring a goal from Lee Chin’s great work in getting a shot at Eoin Murphy’s goal. Another replacement Cian Byrne was alert to the rebound and scrambled in the equaliser.
There was still time for Drennan to drop short a free from over 50 metres as the seconds drained away.
New Wexford manager Keith Rossiter sounded enervated by it all.
“If they’re all going to be like that, I don’t know if I’ll last!”
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