MICKEY Harte insists Tyrone don't have a psychological edge over Sunday's Ulster Championship opponents Derry, despite recording four straight wins over their neighbours already this season.
The Red Hands have beaten their rivals in the O Fiaich Cup, twice in the Dr McKenna Cup and made it four in-a-row in a Division Two clash at Healy Park in early March. However, Harte dismissed that quartet of wins as having absolutely no bearing on what might happen at Celtic Park on Sunday.
At the team's press night in Garvaghey, the Tyrone manager rejected the proposition his team has an advantage: "We don’t really think like that because we want to beat every team we play," said Harte.
"It doesn’t matter if it’s Derry or anybody else - we don’t like losing games."
Indeed, Harte added Derry perhaps should have taken the honours in their two McKenna Cup meetings earlier this year. In the group clash at Owenbeg, Derry, who grabbed four goals, let a nine-point deficit slip and they lost by the narrowest of margins, while Damian Barton's men allowed Tyrone back into the McKenna Cup final in the dying moments and lost by four points in extra-time.
Harte said: "Really, the truth of the matter is, apart from the O Fiaich Cup and our league game, it should really be two-all; it shouldn’t be four-nil because they had us on the ropes in Owenbeg, they had one hand on the McKenna Cup and didn’t hold onto it and we got extra-time.
“So it’s a false sense of this sort of superiority that’s there. It’s not true. If you really look into the detail of those games… I’m sure they’re not looking at this being an impossible task for them. They’ll be saying: ‘Those two days we ought to have been winners’. And if they should have been winners then, there is no reason they couldn’t be winners on another day.”
Many people regard Tyrone as favourites to win their first Ulster title this year since 2010 and believe they are best equipped to challenge Dublin for the All-Ireland title.
But Harte was keen to dismiss such talk ahead of their first Championship outing of the year: “It is a bit foolhardy for people to be speaking like that.
"We all know Ulster is a minefield and always has been. Our ‘Dublin’ is in Celtic Park next week. That’s our ‘Dublin’. And we have to treat Derry the very same way we would treat Dublin, Kerry or Cork or any of the top teams in the country and we have to be playing at the top of our game to make sure that we get the result that we want.
“But to be truthful, we’ve no control over that. It really doesn’t matter what anybody says outside of our camp in terms of how we are going to perform this year. If we’re going to react or respond to whether it’s good talk about you or bad talk about you, then you won’t deliver the best of yourself.
“If we’d listened to all the information that was out there last year, then we would have curled up and gone home and forgot about football. We didn’t do that. So if we were to take this on board now that we are suddenly heading to the pinnacle, we’d be foolish.”
Harte’s greatest fitness concerns ahead of Sunday’s trip to Celtic Park are Omagh trio Conor Meyler, Conor Clarke and Justin McMahon, with the latter deemed the most likely to make it.
The Red Hands boss was keen to ram home the point they don’t have any right to think they will make it five straight wins over Barton’s Derry team: “There’s no point in us going around thinking: ‘We’ve got this sussed, we know exactly how Derry are going to play, we know everything about them, we know everything about their players…’
“We know as much about them up until this time. We don’t know what they’re going to bring on Sunday because that is a different day.”
