Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher a perfect match for Tyrone

There was no grand plan. Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher never hunkered down over pints to pinky-swear an oath that they would one day join forces to manage Tyrone. It was a much more organic thing than that. Happenstance, really.

In late 2013, Logan had just finished up a spell managing co-managing Donoghmore with former Tyrone teammate Adrian Cush when he got a call out of the blue telling him he had been nominated to take over the Tyrone under-21s. He hadn’t gone looking for the job, hadn’t even considered making a play for it.

Yet here it was, his if he wanted it. Logan had done some bits and pieces in the Tyrone academies so he was in the system already to some extent. From time to time, the county would have found itself needing legal guidance - DRA hearings and the like - and Logan was always the first call. Most of all, you’d have said he was well got around the place. Nobody, in fact, was better got.

"You'll go the length and breadth of Tyrone," says Peter Canavan, "and you'll struggle to find somebody who has a bad word to say about Feargal. He has a very good demeanour. From having worked with him, it's never a case of Feargal laying down the law or anything like that. He brings people in to do jobs and he lets them get on with it.

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“As a player there was no ego attached to Feargal and that has continued into management. It’s not about him. It’s not his team. The fact that he was happy going in along with other men - it was never the case that he wanted to be Tyrone manager, he didn’t want to be this towering figure in the county or anything. And I think players recognise that and understand that and as a result they tend to give their best for him.”

All-Ireland champions

Where Dooher came into the reckoning says plenty about both of them. He was still playing club football in 2013 and had only walked off the intercounty stage two years previously after a 17-season career. Raymond Mulroe immediately saved him from retirement and got him in to work with the county under-21s so when Logan took over, he saw no good reason to tell him to leave.

Logan asked Canavan to come on board with them as well but for one reason and another, the ultimate Tyrone legend couldn’t commit. So for that first year, 2014, it was Logan and Dooher. Canavan did join up the following season and they ultimately ended up as All-Ireland champions for the first time in 14 years.

Mark McReynolds was the goalkeeper on that original 2014 team. It was his second year at under-21 and he had been in the Tyrone system since his mid-teens. He’d seen plenty of management teams try plenty of approaches, all to varying degrees of success. Logan and Dooher had their own way of going about it.

“The thing about it when you’re at that age group, it’s very easy for management to come in and treat you like you’re still at school,” McReynolds says. “They try to be the teacher or they try to be the dad type of thing. But it wasn’t like that with Feargal and Brian. It was, ‘We’re all adults here, we’re all going to be treated like adults.’

“It was quite refreshing, especially at that age group. The environment they created made you want to be there. Like, you’ll always want to play for your county obviously but this was more than that. You looked forward to going and being a part of it with them.

“I know people go on about them being Good Cop-Bad Cop but that’s not it. You’d know straight away that Feargal talks in front of people for a living. He’s very polished and the one thing you always knew was that whatever he was saying, it was well thought-out beforehand. Nothing was off-the-cuff.

“Brian is more animated but he’s not harder on you than Feargal is or anything like that. He expects effort. He expects you to be engaged, giving 100 per cent effort at all times. He’s a lot like he was as a player. Busy. There to do a job.”

Enda McGinley tells the ultimate Dooher story. Way back when, Tyrone were at a pre-All-Ireland weekend in Citywest. There wasn’t a scheduled gym session organised but a few of them drifted in anyway, half to get a sweat on, half to be seen getting a sweat on. To nobody’s surprise, Dooher was in there ahead of them, pounding away on the treadmill.

“It was sitting at a brave incline,” McGinley told the Our Game Football Show a few months back. “This was somewhere between a Stairmaster and a vertical climb and it was Dooher’s characteristic run, which looked terrible. It looked like he was ready to fall off an keel over. Panting, unsteady but just going, going, going. And I thought, ‘Right, I’ll saddle up beside the captain here and show him what a good teammate I am.”

You can likely fill in the rest yourself. McGinley was one of the fittest, most durable Tyrone players of that era. But Dooher was Dooher. McGinley was 15 minutes into his run when the needle started going into the red and all the while, he was waiting for Dooher to step off, seeing as he had clearly started long before him. No luck. After 20 minutes, the younger man cried enough and called time. Dooher never broke stride.

“He reminds me of Olympic rowers and cyclists,” McGinley said. “That apparent ability to go beyond and for the body to feel no pain. Never, ever any softness in him, in his attitude to opponents, in his attitude to work. You hardened up and you got on with it. Dooher is the ultimate no-excuse culture.”

Canavan counts Logan as a lifelong friend. Played with him, managed with him, celebrated and consoled plenty of times too. He couldn’t help a wry smile when he heard people suggesting that Tyrone were pulling a stroke around the Covid stuff. It isn’t that he wouldn’t put it past some managers he has come across. It’s that he knows Logan and knows what he’s about. He isn’t about that.

Integrity

“Feargal has a serious amount of respect anywhere he goes,” Canavan says. “There’s an integrity and an honesty about him that people recognise and understand. When it came to the situation which we found ourselves in a number of weeks back, that stood to us. It meant that when Feargal was going to Croke Park with the facts of the scenario, nobody in Croke Park was under any illusions.

“They knew straight away that this was for real. They knew that he would have nothing to do with a made-up situation, that there was no way he was chancing his arm and that it was a very serious situation. He has built up a level of integrity and respect over the years in his dealings with everyone.”

When Mickey Harte finally pulled stumps last winter, Logan and Dooher were anointed within 11 days. The 2015 under-21 All-Ireland was part of it, especially with the senior squad backboned now by the likes of Kieran McGeary, Cathal McShane, Frank Burns et al. But it was also the fact that short of Canavan himself, nobody in the county carried the weight of respect that comes baked in with them.

It has been far from plain sailing. Not many first-year managements would get away with taking a six-goal hiding in Killarney. Fewer still would get the backing of their people if they proposed pulling their team from the championship. It would be one thing for someone like Harte, in situ almost two decades and secure in his standing to have done it. For Logan and Dooher to offer it up just nine months into the job - and hear barely a whiff of pushback within the county over it - indicates just how they are regarded.

“Back in February, I got Brian in to give a talk at the Dermot Earley Initiative,” says Ciarán McLoughlin, the former Tyrone chairman who appointed Logan and Dooher to that under-21 job in 2013. “He asked me what I wanted him to talk to the kids about and I just said, ‘Talk about leadership.’

“By the end of it, the children and the other tutors were absolutely in awe. He talked about what it takes to be a leader. He talked about the challenges you face in life. These kids were 17, 18 years old and he drove it home to them that they will come across things that go wrong, things that they can’t plan for. And he talked about grasping the nettle, taking every challenge for what it is - something that can be overcome, rather than something that can inhibit you.”

Biggest stage

Logan, Dooher and Canavan played together on Tyrone squads and teams that had good days and brutal days. The All-Ireland final of 1995, the 1996 semi-final. Tyrone reaching, scratching, grasping at the big prize but it just eluding them by fair means and foul. In time, Canavan got back to the biggest stage and got up the Hogan Stand steps. Dooher too. Logan was a few years older than them and didn’t.

“That must be remembered here,” Canavan says. “We lost an All-Ireland final in ‘95 in controversial circumstances and at that stage, we didn’t know if we would ever be back. We got our chance at redemption in 2003. But Feargal Logan and a number of other men never got that chance. There’s a void very much there for those men.

“That’s something that Feargal has talked about a lot. There was nobody more happy than him in 2003 to see us winning it. But the bottom line was, he was there in an All-Ireland final and didn’t get over the line. Obviously I have a son involved and you would wish to see him do it. But I will be very proud to see Feargal Logan go up the steps.”

If he does, he won’t be alone. That’s never been his way.