AS the September sun blazed in, the big billiards table in north Dublin seemed almost impossibly large.
Croke Park is a big pitch at the best of times. But on Saturday it appeared to have eaten into the front two rows of seats on all four sides.
I reached for my phone. The timestamp on them says the game was eight minutes old. I fired off a series of photos as Mayo began to build an attack from deep.
Ronan McNamee and Michael McKernan were all alone in the full-back line. They had Aidan O’Shea and Ryan O’Donoghue with literally 3,500 square metres to defend.
The photos were indisputable proof of what was unfolding.
I spent most of last week wondering what exactly had changed for Tyrone under Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher. The answer was suddenly staring us in the face.
Every green and red shirt was being tagged by a white one. In the era of nuclear warfare, Tyrone and Mayo had brought bayonets.
This once-simple game complicated by smart men unfairly profiled as idiots had returned to a simpler state of being.
Against Kerry, Tyrone looked and played an awful lot like a Mickey Harte team. Bodies back, strip the ball, run.
The personnel are identical, barring a few positional switches.
Coming to the cusp of an All-Ireland from nowhere couldn’t just be the bounce of freshness. There had to be more substance.
And then, chatting to Kyle Coney for a piece on the subject, the lightbulb finally came on.
Coney described the team’s defensive structure under Mickey Harte. Two man-markers inside and everyone else filtering back into positions to keep the team’s shape.
“You maybe had two in the first line, three in the second line, two in the next line, then Meyler and McGeary doing the work on the flanks – that was your blockade.”
Even this week, praise for the strength of Tyrone’s collective has been widespread.
Yet their All-Ireland success was founded on the exact opposite.
Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan took this team to an All-Ireland because they gave the players individual responsibility.
In the build-up, a calm Niall Morgan sat downstairs in his Theatre of Dreams watching Cristiano Ronaldo return to his with two goals for Manchester United.
Gary Neville harked back over the weekend to an article he’d written about Ronaldo back in 2012.
Neville had written: “I will never forget coming back from a game against Charlton some time after Cristiano Ronaldo had signed for Manchester United and thinking to myself: ‘Do you know what? I just give up with him’.
“He had been flailing around on the ground, he was never in his position and he was unreliable.”
Neville had yet to understand Ronaldo’s philosophy on the game that he would come to master.
It would take even his own team-mates years to understand. Eventually Neville got it. Later in the same piece, he wrote of Ronaldo: “He believed in the team ethic. He also believed that the team would be better if he was the world’s best.”
The best teams are always made up of the best players.
Tyrone have always prided themselves on being greater than the sum of their parts.
In more recent years, they had come to see the collective as a comfort blanket. Everybody drop back, sit in and tackle as a unit.
That was all great until Mayo, Kerry or Dublin got them into Croke Park.
Between 2010 and 2019, they played 11 championship games against those three. Not only did they fail to win any of them, but they scored just three goals in those 11 games.
One of those was a consolation in the 2012 annihilation down in Killarney, and the other two were Peter Harte penalties, three years apart against Kerry (2015) and Dublin (2018).
0-13 v Dublin. 0-15 v Dublin. 0-13 v Mayo. 1-11 v Kerry. 0-12 v Mayo. 0-11 v Dublin. 1-14 v Dublin, when after 66 minutes they had 0-12 and were eight points down. Those were Tyrone’s scoring returns in the big Croke Park games.
This summer, Tyrone scored 2-11 against Kerry (normal time) and 2-14 against Mayo. Their entire improvement in attack was because players weren’t instructed to go and sit back behind the ball. If your man goes, you go. Otherwise, stay put, our defence is good enough to cope.
Individually, Tyrone hadn’t been good enough to win an All-Ireland until now. Their full-back line was seldom road-tested in one-to-one situations and then when it came to the biggest days, they weren’t ready.
That has been the big difference under Logan and Dooher.
When I took those photos on Saturday, no blanket existed. The individual match-ups all over the pitch were easy to spot.
The aggression McNamee, Hampsey, McKernan, Peter Harte (having his best ever season) brought to their defending was the kind we haven’t always seen from them. It’s been more about blocking off zones and forcing attackers into certain areas, then trying to strip them.
On Saturday, Tyrone’s defence attacked every ball hard. They got into Mayo’s faces from front to back. They were outstanding.
That allowed the whole team to go on the front foot and cut off Mayo’s running game at source.
Brian Kennedy, your job is Ruane, go and do it.
Conn Kilpatrick, whether it's Loftus or O'Connor, you take them.
Peter Harte, centre-back, whoever comes in to you, deal with it.
In exactly the type of game that Mayo have always thrived in, with the exception of Keegan, almost all of James Horan’s big middle-eight players were close to anonymous.
For further evidence of what has changed, look at Conor Meyler’s progression.
Kevin Madden’s column in yesterday’s Irish News was instructive. Madden, who coached Tyrone last year, revealed that Meyler was fed up of being seen as just a spoiler, someone to tag a man.
Meyler has been tagging men to brilliant effect for many years. I first saw him do it in an Ulster Club final for Omagh seven years ago, when he completely nullified Chrissy McKaigue.
The difference in Meyler 2021 is that he’s been trusted to be good enough on the ball. Go ahead and kick it, you’re good enough. The result was his superb ball for McShane’s goal on Saturday.
The collective is always only ever the sum of its individuals.
By empowering the individual, Tyrone improved the collective.
New Zealand’s rugby principles are often cited in relation to winning teams. Sweep the sheds. Write your own legacy. No d***heads.
What’s often forgotten is that New Zealand tend to win World Cups because, to a man, they’re better at the basic skills than anyone else. They’re all individually comfortable with the ball in their hands. They can all be trusted to do their job without a safety net.
That’s been the same with Dublin. Their forwards take much credit but Jonny Cooper, Philly McMahon, John Small, Michael Fitzsimons were all among the best one-to-one defenders the game has ever seen.
That aggression and willingness has been a Mayo hallmark of the last generation - Keith Higgins, Colm Boyle, Lee Keegan will go down in the same bracket.
Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher cut away the safety net. They’ve not only trusted their players to be good enough, but demanded that they are.
The collective expected, and needed, them to be better as individuals.
When they were given no place to hide on Saturday, Tyrone’s players took a big step out of the shadows.
That’s why they’re All-Ireland champions.
