THINGS MOVE quickly from now on in the championship. Provincial winners come face to face with sudden death and even teams as accomplished as All-Ireland champions Tyrone feel the icy trace of mortality.

“You have to be concerned when you reach the latter stages of the championship,” said the winners’ manager Mickey Harte. “The knock-out stages started today. There is no get-out clause. This is real championship. This is sudden death.”

Harte had twice seen his team bite the dust at the quarter-final stage and yesterday after a serious tussle with Kildare, he agreed relief was the governing mood.

“It’s the main emotion. It’s a great reflection on what these players are about. It would have been easy to roll over there today. It would have been easy to decide maybe this year wasn’t for us. But it is still for us. It is still there to be taken. We are in the last four.

“Kildare asked serious questions of us. The story going into this game was had we been tested? I think after today that question can be removed. We were certainly tested and full credit to Kildare for that.

“I would have to say experience was the difference on the field today. They matched us in virtually every way and they created as many opportunities as we did. The start of the second half was just exactly what we needed. The longer we were able to keep them from mounting an attack, never mind a score, was so important.”

By the start of the second half the champions were in trouble, on the back foot against an eager, athletic Kildare side managed by someone who knew as much as anyone about the champions, former Armagh captain Kieran McGeeney, a veteran of four Croke Park battles with Tyrone.

“I think Kildare were always going to come out and try and boss the first half,” said Harte. “They needed to stamp their authority on the game and jolt us into a place where we didn’t expect to be. It can be difficult to deal with that on the spot. Again, as long as we could keep reasonably within touch, we felt we would be okay. At one stage we felt we had it down to one, and felt it would have been okay going in at half-time only two down.

“The fact we were four points down was reminiscent of Dublin in ’05 when we were hanging on by our finger nails. We were able to draw on that experience and say: ‘It’s not a lost cause. You can turn this around.’ That’s what experience is, I suppose.”

For his part, McGeeney felt Kildare had left the match behind them having recovered from that initial collapse at the start of the second half to go down the final straight neck and neck.

“Yeah, definitely. We even shot three wides in the last few minutes. Disappointed wouldn’t cover it. We thought we did enough to win and we are capable of doing a lot better.”

Asked had the difference been simply down to experience, he expanded. “Yeah but it’s a word and it’s hard to put something concrete around it. A fumble here, a fumble there. A decision here, a decision there. It’s hard for me to be objective because I am obviously going to see it from one point of view. I do honestly feel we left it behind. We have great pace in the team, great talent. Our players maybe didn’t have the wee bit of bite or badness that you need to win at this level.

“You have to give credit to Tyrone. They know how to press up and put people under pressure. There are games within games in football and you see them happening off the ball more than on the ball. Tyrone have that experience to impose their own game. They have won three All-Ireland titles in the last six years. They are the best football team of the last 30 years in my book, bar none.”

Tyrone captain Brian Dooher said he felt Kildare had given his team their toughest challenge in this year’s championship.

“I felt it was. The scoreline tells you that and the fact they were up at half-time. It was definitely the toughest we’ve had but we knew we’d get it tough . . . For a long time it looked like Kildare were going to win.”

In just under three weeks Tyrone will face Cork in what promises to be a cracking semi-final between the best sides in the championship to date. Asked had he seen Cork’s destruction of Donegal, Harte replied: “I didn’t. The scoreline tells me plenty. We will get a look at that in due course. I suppose they are in the same mould as Kildare. They have a lot of big, physical players and they play at pace. I hope that has been a good testing ground for us today.”