GAELIC GAMES: Maybe now we can say the football championship has truly begun. Tyrone have just lost one hand-hold on their All-Ireland title, and the other one looks to be slipping fast. This could easily be the turning point of the whole summer.

God knows how Tyrone will respond in the qualifiers - and whether it proves a back door or trapdoor - but what is certain is the reverberations of what happened here yesterday afternoon will be felt around the country. After the nature of this defeat, they have to be.

Not a single score in the first half; down a man after 17 minutes; frequently run ragged and ultimately outsmarted and outmuscled. Worst of all, though, made to look like boys against the men of Derry, their fiercest of old rivals, who along with Armagh are the opposition they most despise losing to.

In the end, Tyrone left their home ground of Healy Park heartbroken, back-broken, spirit-broken and maybe even dream-broken.

Beaten 1-8 to 0-5, they were never even in contention for the win, a shadow of the team that produced the 10-game run to last summer's All-Ireland title. Many of their supporters in the 18,150-crowd started spilling out before the end, and they had good reason. If you missed the game, forget about watching the video. It was forgettable stuff, beyond the result.

In fact, the day soon developed a heavy air of inevitability - to match the heavy hitting. Tension didn't run high but tempers often did, and at times it felt more like being inside the Coliseum.

Tyrone full forward Kevin Hughes was shown a straight red card on 17 minutes, but they were in trouble well before that.

While their injury problems were well flagged, Tyrone were still expected to sneak through this one. Only the true believers in Derry football could say they saw it coming.

"Sure you don't see anything coming when you're playing Tyrone," said Derry manager Paddy Crozier, trying to contain his obvious satisfaction. "Not in the first round of the Ulster championship, on their home ground, and them the All-Ireland champions. Sure maybe we were on a hiding to nothing.

"But it's a big psychological win for Derry, sure it is. But when we won four matches in the national league suddenly all expectations went through the sky. We'll be wary of that one and won't be getting carried away.

"Of course it is sweet though, and any Derryman likes to beat Tyrone. And when they're All-Ireland champions it's all the sweeter. But it's the first game in the Ulster championship. Nothing more than that."

Tyrone manager Mickey Harte could hold up a banner of excuses for this loss. No Stephen O'Neill or Brian McGuigan - and don't forget Peter Canavan - but he wasn't prepared to raise it.

"We still had our own expectations," said Harte, "and prepared the team to play as well as we can. And they did prepare to play as well as they can. They expect to win these games, and this was no different. There was no point in going out unless we felt that way.

"But we're into the unknown now and have no idea who or where we're playing next. It's all in the lap of the gods really.

"But we know there are teams just as good as Derry out there in the qualifiers, and if we perform like that again it will be the end of the season at a very early time. And that's not something to look forward to for any of us."

Yet it was a day when nothing went right for Tyrone.

"True, the game took on a life of its own," suggested Harte. "A lot of things happened out there that you can't legislate for. Like I thought there was a kind of a cumulative sort of tackling effect, where some players picked up a black or yellow card but made sure they got no more than that, and that worked for Derry today.

"I think it was clever work by the people that were picking up those cards, that they'd made sure someone else picked up the next one."

Later it was put to Crozier that Harte had suggested Derry were cuter than Tyrone - getting players ticked or booked but nothing more.

"Mickey Harte said that? Maybe we were copying them then," he retorted.

That summed it up really - joy, pain and a little anger. The football championship has truly begun.