Mickey Harte says Tyrone ready to compete for top honours

Not long after claiming no team playing Division Two football could expect to win the All-Ireland title, Mickey Harte now finds himself trying to do exactly that. Although that claim, he says, came with certain caveat.

“It depends on how you interpret it,” says Harte, speaking ahead of Tyrone’s Allianz Football League Division Two final against Cavan on Sunday.

Tyrone have already earned promotion from the second flight, although a few years ago Harte said the All-Ireland champions only ever come from Division One.

“What I said was a Division Two team won’t win an All-Ireland. But you could have a team playing in Division Two, but not of Division Two standard.”

Harte, in other words, believes Tyrone already are of Division One standard, and should have been playing in that division this season. With that comes the assumption he also believes his team can win the All-Ireland.

“I’ve got to believe it’s possible. If I don’t believe it’s possible it won’t happen. If I believe it’s possible it may happen. So I believe it’s possible.

“But I do believe we were above the standard of Division Two. I think last year we played some of our best football. Our worst performance was against Donegal but otherwise we played very well and were very competitive and I don’t believe we are a Division Two team.”

Not that Sunday’s final against Cavan isn’t worth winning. In his now 15 years as Tyrone manager, Harte has always prided himself on winning every game, winning every competition he enters, and that philosophy hasn’t changed.

“I don’t think you can switch on the winning mentality when it suits. I think you’ve got to want to win every game you play in. And if people come to support you they deserve the best, pay through the gates, take pride in the team. It’s a bad mentality to say any game is less important than another.”

At the same time Harte says that’s he a very different manager now compared to 2003, when he guided Tyrone to their first All-Ireland in what was his first season in charge.

“I’m reinventing all the time, all the time. There is no point in doing the things you used to do and expect to get the same results. You’re going to get the same results if you keep doing the same things.

“So I have to be thinking differently. I have to open my mind to new possibilities. I have to look at individual players and deal with them.

New relationships

There are a load of new people in now. For a long time I was dealing with people that I had from minors and under-21.

“ Now the big majority of the team I never had right through the underage structures so I have to build new relationships with them, learn more about them, learn more about myself as I go along. It is a constant process of trying to add value to what you are about as an individual.”

So is he a better manager now than 2003, 2005, or 2008?

“Well what do you mean better? All these things are very subjective statements. I’m obviously a lot more experienced. On reflection, I made plenty of mistakes when we were winning. They weren’t highlighted as much, but when you’re not winning, the mistakes are highlighted by forensic scientists.

“I feel I’m a wiser manager now, even though I mightn’t have as many All-Irelands as I had then. But I want to put that learning into practice, to be in a better place. So it’s about time to get a few titles. That’s why this is important on Sunday, very important.”

It’s well known that Tyrone met again just three days after losing to Kerry in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final, intent on that stage on picking up in 2016 exactly where they left off. His message to his players that day was simple.

“That I believe we have the potential to be back in that zone again, that there is a really good bunch of players there and they’ve got to believe they’re that good. I think that run through the qualifiers last year began to sow the seeds in their head that ‘yes, this is possible, we can play to a very high level’.

Senior citizen

“I’d have to say it’s a process of all the people who work with them who have made this happen. That’s a continuous process and we enjoy the challenge of that.

“There’s a good bunch of players across various age groups. You still have Sean Cavanagh, the senior citizen of all, and it’s very important that he’s there too. There’s a lot of players at various stages of their development and it’s coming together quite well. But it’s also results that talk.

“ Potential is potential, but results say you are fulfilling your potential. There are lots of things to be answered yet. We’re maybe sitting on the cusp of something decent, but one or two games can turn that on its head.”

First-choice goalkeeper Niall Morgan is out for the coming months with a broken hand, although he should be back for the latter stages of the championship. Even with that, Harte feels he has his strongest squad since 2008.

“Possibly it’s heading that way, but that’s to be confirmed yet. It looks like it has that potential to be as strong, but you have to go out and do that on important days.”

Such as Sunday.