Football

'We have no robots' says Tyrone GAA's Gavin Devlin

Peter Harte&rsquo;s contributions to Tyrone&rsquo;s win over Derry at both ends of the pitch illustrate the varying roles Red Hand players are expected to perform<br /> Picture by Colm O&rsquo;Reilly
Peter Harte’s contributions to Tyrone’s win over Derry at both ends of the pitch illustrate the varying roles Red Hand players are expected to perform
Picture by Colm O’Reilly
Peter Harte’s contributions to Tyrone’s win over Derry at both ends of the pitch illustrate the varying roles Red Hand players are expected to perform
Picture by Colm O’Reilly

ON one occasion in the first half of Sunday Ulster SFC quarter-final at Celtic Park, Peter Harte drifted into corner-forward and made his run out from there to meet the incoming ball.

A few minutes later, having pushed up into a Tyrone attack which ended with the ball going dead, Harte stayed in the full-forward line on Thomas Mallon’s kick-out, allowing the Red Hands to press right up.

Mattie Donnelly covered pretty much every position on the pitch at some stage over the 70 minutes on Sunday. Darren McCurry, noted as a finisher, excelled from centre-forward after coming on.

Those are mere examples highlighting the fluidity and interchangeability that has become one of this Tyrone team’s biggest strengths.

The Red Hands’ assistant boss Gavin Devlin stood on the edge of his team’s warm-down in Celtic Park, the rain past and the smile beaming.

Entrusted to display his intelligence as the sweeper on Mickey Harte’s first All-Ireland-winning team, ‘Horse’ knows better than anyone the need for the Tyrone players to think for themselves.

“Our players do a lot of it off the cuff. They’re thinking players. There’s no robots out there and there’s no perfect script in any game of football, even in a training session there’s no perfect script,” said Devlin.

“You don’t know how things will evolve and you have to adapt and add variety to whatever you do. We ask our players to think on their feet and adjust.

“If you have 15 robots, somebody will break it down. Even in a game, you think things are going well but there’s always someone trying to anticipate your downfall.

“There’s two teams playing out there; Derry had a gameplan. We’d no doubt they’d set things up to try and break us down, to tag men, and you have to adapt and think. That’s football. We believe we have players who are quite good at it.”

The Ardboe native is a former manager of Derry clubs Bellaghy and Newbridge, and briefly ran a bar in Ballinascreen, so he knows the Oak Leaf scene well.

Leading by 3-8 to 0-6 at the break having never won in Celtic Park before, Tyrone did ease up somewhat on their neighbours in the second half.

Harte and Devlin wanted their side to drive home their advantage, and referenced the contrast in the two halves of Liverpool’s Europa League final defeat by Sevilla last week.

But the second half display wasn’t enough to particularly please Devlin.

“We push on. We try to push on. There are periods in the second half where we maybe looked to be sitting back, but at half-time we were ramming home that we wanted to push on, we didn’t want to be defending a nine- or ten-point lead.

“We happened to mention at half-time the Liverpool game on Wednesday night. A game’s never over at half-time, you have to go out and put things right in the second half as well.

“At half-time, we wanted to put our skills right, and the way we wanted to go about our work in the second half was seeing it as a good opportunity. As you know, Mickey doesn’t play challenge matches, so we’re not in a position to throw away a competitive 35 minutes.

“We wouldn’t be happy with periods of that 35 minutes in the second half, so we’ve work to do for the next round.”

When Derry and Tyrone stepped back into full training at the turn of the year, they would have had eyes on the dry sod, the big crowd and the intensity of Celtic Park for the meeting of old rivals.

Instead, after almost a fortnight of sunshine, the week ended as it began with a torrential downpour, and the game was every bit as much a damp squib.

“Mickey’s been saying it all week that we’ve been getting plenty of rain in Garvaghy this week, that it was a good omen,” said Devlin.

“The weather had been good up until this week and we were thinking if it was good all week and then come Sunday it’s a wet ball, you wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to try and get our touch right.

“We had plenty of opportunities in Garvaghy this week to hone in on our basic skills, our first touch, and today it was nice and crisp.”