TYRONEmanager Mickey Harte insist he has learned a lesson from past mistakes and will take no risks on injured players for the Ulster SFC opener against Derry on May 12.
The Red Hands were turned over by Monaghan on their own patch last season after gambles on the fitness of three key players backfired.
Colm Cavanagh, Tiernan McCann and Mark Bradley were forced off by recurring injuries as they limped out of the provincial Championship at the first hurdle at Healy Park.
“We ought to learn from that,” said Harte in a candid admission.
“We probably started three men who hadn’t played a lot of football and were nursing injuries through that period of time.
“And I think we would out as that game went on that it probably wasn’t the best decision to make.
“We made it in good faith at the time, but I suppose we should learn from that experience and be more careful now to know that a player needs to be fully ready for Championship football.”
He insisted that any player that takes the field in Omagh for the preliminary round tie against the Oak Leafers will be no less than 100 per cent fit.
“You can’t really carry injuries or worries or niggles that are significant into those games.
“You need to see what work has been done in the recent past. The last couple of weeks is going to be important, how much work players have been able to put in.
“So that will all be part of the decision making process as to who starts the game and who is on the panel.”
The Tyrone players were released back to their clubs following the conclusion of the National Football League, and have played week after week up until last weekend, playing five games.
It was an anxious time for the county manager, but he revealed at a press briefing in Garvaghey on Thursday night that all his men have come through without picking up any serious knocks.
“Thanks be to God there’s no serious injuries. Obviously there’s niggles always, and we find that when boys play a lot of league football,” said Harte.
“You find that the accumulation of niggles adds up to less availability at the training sessions, but thankfully there’s no serious injuries.
“Nobody has said that for sure they won’t be able to play, and that’s a real bonus.
“We’ll see as the week goes on how those niggles clear up, who is in a better place, but as of now we couldn’t say that there’s anybody unavailable.”
Harte suggested that Tyrone will continue to develop the new long ball strategy which proved so effective in the latter stages of the National Football League, despite the absence of the experimental ‘offensive mark’ rule for the Championship.
“I’m not so sure it will curtail it, it will just change the outcome. The safety of when people caught that clean ball, they had two options. They could stop and take their free, or go on. Now, it means they have to go on.
“Maybe it will deter people from playing it in as much. I don’t know, we will have to see that happens. But it means it will not be as easy for the forward just to take that mark and know he is being horsed back both ways. He won’t have that any more.
“People will decide what they need to do and do it. We will decide what we need to do and do it.
“I suppose the one thing we will learn and we learned it as far back as 2003 when we played Derry, we had a good league run that took us to the title, playing a certain style of football. When we went to play Derry in the first round of the Championship it almost didn’t work. And we almost got beaten that day.
“We had to review that. So we should learn from these things, learn from the experience and know that it isn’t about a single method of playing any more. You have to adjust, you have to adapt and maybe play one way for a while and a different way. And it’s to have that adaptability to change within a game is as important as anything now.”
