On Gaelic Games:Due to the county's assembly line of talent, there is no reason to fear Tyrone's epoch of success has passed for the foreseeable future

FOR ALL the not unreasonable insistence that it’s too early to call time on Tyrone, there was a definite end-of-era atmosphere around Croke Park on Sunday. Whereas it’s plausible to point out that the team is young and that only Brian Dooher of their front-line players is of an age (34) at which retirement is likely, the fact remains teams age as certainly as individuals and there were indisputable signs that the characteristics that made Mickey Harte’s team great are fading.

Reading the entrails of the champions’ most recent defeat is complicated by the fact Tyrone have always operated as a binary function – either on or off. Last week I couldn’t think of a quality performance in a match that the team hadn’t won or of a defeat where they hadn’t played badly. There was no in between.

In the sometimes tendentious debate about whether they or Kerry have been the team of the decade, Tyrone’s strongest argument has been their head-to-head track record against their biggest rivals; the strongest argument against them, the failure to challenge consistently and successfully defend the title.

Kerry in this decade have won four All-Irelands, including two back-to-back, reached three other finals and been to the semi-finals every year.

There has been some post-hoc rationalisation of the Ulster champions’ displays this summer. The charge that they had been sluggish in the province can be tallied with a low-key campaign, but they cruised past the challenge of their two most established rivals, Armagh and Derry, and effortlessly handled the unusual presence of Antrim in the final by effectively winning the match in the first quarter.

If the All-Ireland quarter-final against Kildare featured more difficulties than a team of their calibre should have been experiencing against the Leinster finalists, it had to be accepted that few managers are as familiar with the demands of playing Tyrone as Kieran McGeeney and that, in the end, it was a performance of impressive calm on the part of the champions, refusing to panic and doing enough to win.

Prior to last Sunday, Harte’s team had never lost beyond the quarter-finals. That, in itself, is impressive testimony to their ability to shut out championships.

The great postscript is, of course, the illness of Seán Cavanagh. For any team the loss of a player who has three All Stars and the current Footballer of the Year accolade is bound to be a major handicap and, although it’s impossible to identify how this impacted on the result, there was one very noticeable effect.

Tyrone’s terrific record as competitors and their ability to win close matches, especially in All-Ireland finals, is partly based on tenacity and not the physical characteristic of hounding opponents, but a mental durability that enabled them to hang on to the stirrups of a contest even when it was racing away from them.

That was most evident in their facility for filching points here and there to prevent the scoreboard gradually clicking out of sight. Cavanagh was not only a consistent contributor to getting the best out of sporadic attacks, but he was frequently also the precision instrument, for instance last September.

Losing him before the throw-in was a severe loss as well as a blow to morale coming as close as it did to the match and denying Harte the time and space to draft an emergency plan and salvage the mood within the camp.

In the end, the renowned Tyrone manager resembled a conductor waving his baton at an incomplete orchestra, missing as it was its first violin and coping with other instruments curiously out of tune.

Because football in the county has become so important and harnessed so much enthusiasm, there are few doubts about the assembly line for the future. Already, great youthful talent is identifiable and there is no reason to fear the epoch of success has passed for the foreseeable future.

Assessing the legacy of the past few years isn’t too difficult. Tyrone has represented an extraordinary celebration of the team. Whereas not short of individual talent, the county’s All-Ireland victories have been based on harmony rather than melody.

Even the use of Peter Canavan, as good a player as has been seen, in his final years was so shrewd and well-judged that Harte got the maximum benefit from careful husbandry of resources and the twice-pulled trick of replacing the player and returning him to action in All-Ireland finals.

Deploying your significant talent to optimum effect is only part of management and Harte also accomplished the other important task of getting the best from less gifted individuals and devising the patterns of play within which the whole team might thrive.

Kilkenny hurling manager Brian Cody was reportedly so impressed by Tyrone’s ability to win every sector in a match (“to win the field”) that he set about realising the same ambition in the small-ball game.

It’s probably not widely appreciated that Tyrone are in future likely to be starting only about half of the team that won the breakthrough All-Ireland in 2003. In other words, Harte has been rebuilding and restructuring all along so the expected departure of Dooher won’t faze him for next year, for all that the captain is, in the words of Art McRory, “the heartbeat of the whole operation”.

Four years ago no one knew how the team would cope with the retirement of Canavan, whose skill and temperament on the big occasion had been so crucial to the victories of 2003 and ’05. Last year we got the answer, as an improvised team – missing not just the departed Canavan, but the temporarily retired Stephen O’Neill, notwithstanding a brief appearance in the final – picked off another All-Ireland, again confounding Kerry in the process.

It should also be remembered about them that there was no luck. Misfortune beset the team with macabre persistence.

The death of Cormac McAnallen robbed the team of a colossal talent and that generation’s natural leader.

Brian McGuigan’s succession of injuries took away a player who appeared destined to be the top centre forward of his generation.

But the belief in the collective drove Tyrone to their most memorable achievements – whether in the swarming defence, the infinitely adaptable defenders, the hard-running support play or last year an All-Ireland final attack that included just two starters from the previous success just three years previously.

More than any team, they absorbed horrendous setbacks and yet somehow, from the intensity of those experiences, forged an unbreakable spirit.

smoran@irishtimes.com