Where the Harte Goes Men Will Follow

By Declan Bogue

RIGHT now, if you laid seven pounds down on Dublin to win the All-Ireland, you would get a pound back on your investment with one popular bookmaker. Someone who knows a lot more about gambling than your correspondent here tells me that if you were to place a bet like that with any significant capital, they would find a way to fob you off and refuse it.

Simply put, in  the minds of those who judge these things professionally there is no chance of Tyrone winning their fourth All-Ireland title on the first Sunday of September.

The first year of the Super 8s has left people unsure of where each team are at. Having lost two games this summer, there is certainly a great deal of suspicion held in reserve for Tyrone. 

Some are even expressing the great pity that Mayo are not in the All-Ireland final. They seem unsure of how a competition works. When the pressure was on Mayo, they lost to Galway and Kildare in Championship football. Tyrone lost their games to Monaghan and Dublin. There are levels to this thing.

Quite how Tyrone can be dismissed in this fashion when they have Mickey Harte as manager is staggering. This is a man who has utterly flipped the very notion of Tyrone football and they are going into their fourth All-Ireland final under him as underdogs, Armagh being fancied in 2003 and Kerry entering 2005 and 2008 as favourites. 

The context is important, however. The gap between the two in last year's All-Ireland semi-final was a dozen points. Even though Tyrone employed a certain amount of jiggery-pokery to upset Dublin in Healy Park, they still won by three in the Super 8s tie. 

But three weeks is a long time for Harte to get his head around a few things. He's done it before. 

Such as Sean Cavanagh at full-forward - a tactic that Nudie Hughes told Harte during a radio interview with RTÉ in 2008, that it wasn't working out. Harte disagreed then. Cavanagh finished that season as Footballer of the Year.  

Or the deployment of the McMahon brothers to counter Kerry's 'Twin Towers' attack of Kieran Donaghy and Tommy Walsh in that year’s final. 

And they have caught fancied Dublin sides in the past, famously in 2005 and 2008. 

Of course, you might say that he hasn't produced a result, or a Championship 'shock' as such, for the last ten years. 

It all depends on how much importance you can place on the passage of time. 

Padraig Hampsey watched the 2008 final with his father from the Cusack Stand. He was just twelve. Michael McKernan was only ten. 

After a season and a half of finding their feet in the Tyrone dressing room, the core of the 2015 under-21 All-Ireland winning team became the dominant group in that environment. They brought the beat box in, the trendy haircuts and created a very different environment than the one that Harte set about creating when he gathered the players together in the ballroom of Kelly's Inn in the winter of 2002 and set a goal of winning an All-Ireland. 

Feargal Logan, Peter Canavan and Brian Dooher were over that age grade for three years and no fewer of 17 of the present senior panel came through their hands.

Can you see the pattern? The men of the 1995 final against Dublin inspired the generation that came after them. Harte's success back then, is driving the success right now. His former players have been shuffled into the coaching system.  At the head of it is Harte. Going nowhere and defiant about it. 

Sure, Tyrone might not have the players to go toe to toe with Dublin. But Harte's whole football life has been about breaking cycles and bending the system to suit him.

When Tyrone played Donegal in the 2016 Ulster final, Harte sent Cathal McCarron in to man-mark Michael Murphy. As things transpired, McCarron actually outscored Murphy that day from play. 

Rather than repeat the trick the following year, Harte chose Hampsey for the role. It was an even greater trick. 

When they lost to Monaghan in Ulster, Ronan McNamee marked Conor McManus and although he did alright in the circumstances, using Hampsey on him last Sunday was a masterstroke. 

Against Dublin, to upset their flow, Hampsey should be pushed onto Ciaran Kilkenny. It's not just match-ups. A lot more goes into it than that. In 2003, the media had build Armagh up to have superhero levels of strength and physique. When Harte totted it up, the Tyrone players aggregate weight was a mere ounce less than Armagh.

Harte handed out an ounce to his players and asked them if they would let it become a defining factor in the game.

Naturally, it was enough to convince them. Did anyone really tot up the weights and work it out? Maybe. But maybe it was just a clever ploy.

And there's a few more to come.