Seán Moran: Once again, Ulster football championship defies all predictions

It has long been established that in the predictions game, the Ulster football championship comes second only to making a living out of penny stocks. That essential lesson was re-taught at the weekend when Derry made a successful raid on Omagh, home of the All-Ireland champions.

I remember a pub discussion in late 1991 in the wake of Down’s seismic All-Ireland win. There was consensus that Ulster’s time was at hand, but which of the counties would be next up?

Derry featured strongly as, under the new management of Eamonn Coleman, they were harnessing some great young talent. Tyrone also arose. After all, captained by Peter Canavan, they had landed that year's under-21 championship with a thumping 20-point win in the final against Kerry.

Down also had their backers to retain the title. Inevitably, no one mentioned Donegal, who actually did take home Sam Maguire in 1992.

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The competitiveness of Ulster is a well-worn cliche and nowhere has it greater impact than in the effect on All-Ireland champions from the province. Of the last 13 All-Ireland winners from Ulster, 11 have been beaten in the province the following year.

That’s massively different to the experience elsewhere. Only Connacht – where six of their last 13 All-Ireland champions haven’t made it out of the province the following year – comes close to a 50 per cent attrition rate. Munster are two from 13 and Leinster three.

So Tyrone’s fate at the weekend could be deemed an occupational hazard for any team defending an Ulster title. There is after all a high standard in the province. Half of AFL Division One is made up of its counties.

One of the problems for the champions, however, is that none of those actually administered the defeat. Instead it was Derry, with whom Tyrone once had an intense rivalry but who hadn’t beaten them in 16 years of championship.

No one’s fancy

Although astutely managed by Rory Gallagher, the former Fermanagh player who was part of the Donegal backroom team when they won the 2012 All-Ireland, Derry had been virtually no one's fancy to conduct a successful raid on Healy Park.

They had had a disappointing league campaign in Division Two, starting as one of the favourites for promotion but falling away and dropping points to the eventually promoted Connacht duo Galway and Roscommon.

There is a tradition at this stage that Tyrone don’t defend All-Irelands particularly well but even so, to get mauled by a team that hasn’t challenged in a long time requires some explanation.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Derry, for all the disappointment of an underwhelming league, caught the eye in last year’s championship when coming so close to Donegal. But in the meantime, their neighbours had won an Ulster and an All-Ireland.

Maybe the shock of that success, which was the least-anticipated Sam Maguire capture in three decades, took a toll on the team.

Throughout the months leading to championship there has been a steady stream of panel departures, none of them considered individually critical to the fortunes of the team but cumulatively a big drain of players who took part in an All-Ireland winning season and yet didn’t want to continue.

Of their All Stars, only Conor Meyler has fully retained his form from last year. Others have struggled and the most telling index of this has been in the area of discipline.

Footballer of the Year Kieran McGeary was sent off in the first match of the season, against Monaghan, after picking up two yellows; a week later he was one of four players red-carded after a melee in Armagh along with captain Pádraig Hampsey, Michael McKernan and Peter Harte.

Hampsey also got sent off again after gratuitously pushing Cormac Costello while off the field when Dublin came to Omagh.

No improvement

Championship has been no improvement and Conor McKenna picked up a red in the first match against Fermanagh, having done well when coming into the match to help Tyrone turn around a poor first-half display.

The sending-off was quashed at a disciplinary hearing after some “angels dancing on the head of a melee” deliberation by the CHC – maybe influenced by the Armagh-Donegal fiasco just a week previously.

McKenna celebrated his exculpation by getting himself another red card against Derry at the weekend, joining All Star Brian Kennedy on the line.

Last year McKenna was very impressive on his return from the AFL, but some local observers don’t think that he’s fully acclimatised yet to football on this side of the world.

It was also an eighth red card for the team this season, which so far has encompassed just nine fixtures. That’s a lot of missing player minutes in important matches.

It has also been noted that when discipline starts to slip, one of the most-affected zones is defence. Players don’t work quite as hard, don’t bother making all the runs that they should and gaps inevitably appear. That sloppiness was everywhere on Sunday.

Combine that with a half-back line affected by late selection Peter Harte’s inclusion a couple of weeks after having his appendix removed – with all the disruptive effect that had on match preparation for one of the team’s most influential personnel.

Another in that category, Matthew Donnelly, has yet to recover from a hamstring injury that curtailed his appearances in the league campaign.

Derry didn’t need to be asked twice to punish these weaknesses and did so with aplomb.

The lifeline of the qualifiers now looms, a welcome option after two years of the unmitigated sudden-death format. Tyrone have exploited this route in the past but it has to be said that having lost in Ulster as All-Ireland champions, they have never recovered to reach an All-Ireland final – let alone win one.

seanmoran@irishtimes.com