Like many others, I was glued to the television on Sunday night watching Rory McIlroy finally get home in Augusta. There’s no need to go on about it after a football weekend that was fairly disappointing and low on thrills but the importance of clearing the head and not panicking despite mistakes was obvious.
Cavan hadn’t beaten Tyrone in the championship for 42 years, so there was a psychological challenge as well as a football test. They were coming off a reasonable league but hadn’t taken the chance to get promoted when it was there in their last match.
All told, Sunday was a daunting task and they never looked like getting there. Although the margin came back to six points at one stage, it never really looked like they were going to close the gap and when Conn Kilpatrick got the goal, that was pretty much the nail in the coffin.
Overall, I thought Tyrone were good. Obviously, if your main man is not playing, it could unsettle you quite quickly and quite easily but they had a lot of different scorers, which was quite impressive.
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Darragh Canavan was out, but 13 of the starting 15 scored. There were no worldies kicked. They were all simply worked into that area, in around the edge of the D, for easy scores, where they just knocked the ball over the bar, which is good for Tyrone.
They’ve got a good mixture of youth and experience. Aidan Clark and Niall Devlin, the two corner backs and Peter Teague at full back – that’s a young full-back line and they stepped up quite well on Sunday.
Both Teague and Devlin got on the scoresheet. Michael McKernan got on the score sheet. Kieran McGeary got on the score sheet. Niall Morgan. So, five out of the first seven scored. That’s hard to pin down for an opposition team.
No team wants to be over-relying on one of their scorers. They were getting into decent positions, moving the ball well. Their interplay was good. And they have influential players to come back. As well as Canavan, Mark Bradley wasn’t there and nor was Pádraig Hampsey.
You could see the effect of Malachy O’Rourke and his priorities: the value of the work ethic and running and movement. They obviously have a good body of work done so far this year and were away on a training camp only recently.
McGeary and Morgan were talking after the game and mentioned how close they were getting as a group, which will be vital to getting them back as contenders for the All-Ireland, which after all they won just four years ago.
When Malachy took over Monaghan, we were in Division Three. The big thing was he got us working really, really hard, and he got us winning games. That was the key. It might have just been Division Three but he built our confidence and got us believing in him and his plan.
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He would have set out the plan for Tyrone at the start of the year. I’m fairly sure that going down into Division Two wasn’t part of it, but at the same time, they can take a decent bit of encouragement out of their league.
They got relegated on seven points, which had never happened before and they finished strongly, unbeaten against three provincial champions. So they wouldn’t have been too despondent about that.
Anyway, the last two All-Ireland winners have come from Division Two, so it’s no big obstacle next year. This year they have the advantage of a Division One campaign under their belts and although most people probably have Armagh as favourites for the semi-final, I think Tyrone are more of a 50-50 shot.
I remember seeing Jim McGuinness interviewed a couple of weeks ago and somebody mentioned to him that the only team that he’d lost to in Ulster is Monaghan. His response was jokey, sort of, “oh thanks for reminding me of that”, but I’d say he has been drilling it into his players since beating Derry.
That’s the record and that’s the narrative that’s out there. He’ll be challenging his players to set that straight. It’ll not make it easy for Monaghan but they have had a good league and got promoted straight back to Division One.
Micheál Bannigan, Stephen O’Hanlon and Conor McCarthy are really on song and while Donegal will obviously have a plan for all of that, Monaghan will have their own ideas and I think we’re in for a good game in Clones.
Derry’s kick-outs were very poor and it was something that Donegal really homed in on and caused a lot of damage. They won’t be attacking Rory Beggan’s kick-out as easily as that.
Rory’s dead-ball kicking is also getting better, more consistent, and nearly any time he steps up to strike off the ground, it’s a score.
Sometimes you take it for granted as a player when he’s standing over a free-kick, maybe 50, 55 yards out. You’re standing on the goalpost, alert in case it hits the post or something. But you just look up and it’s sailing over the bar.
Sunday will be a meeting of two of the best goalkeepers in the game. Shaun Patton’s restarts against Derry were very impressive and that’s something that Monaghan will have to work on. The battle of the two ‘keepers will be massive – and will go a long way to determining who wins.
