Irish News columnist Enda McGinley was a member of the six Tyrone teams Mickey Harte guided to All-Ireland titles at minor, U21 and senior level. He looks back to the start of that era and how Harte instilled something special in him and his team-mates, on and off the pitch...
THE phrase ‘end of an era’ has been heard commonly this week as rumours turned to likelihood and finally to fact: Mickey Harte had stepped down as Tyrone senior manager.
Rather than look at the end I can’t help but think of the start of that era.
The story is well known by now.
The real start came in 1997 when the nucleus of a special team started to form.
Mickey’s own managerial career had started away back in 1991 but it was the 1997 and 1998 minor teams that marked the dawning of a new age.
I joined in 1998,the year after the first of the team-defining tragedies struck.
Paul McGirr’s death after being injured in the minor championship against Armagh sent shock waves around Ireland, but more significantly it burrowed deep into the soul of that young Tyrone team.
At the end of 1997 a young Brian McGuigan and Stephen O’Neill convinced Harte to stay another year.
It proved to be a sliding-doors moment and led to the watershed minor All-Ireland title in 1998.
Minor wins always inspire great hope of future success, yet often prove to be mirages and in time symbols of future unfulfilled potential.
That one was different.
It lit a flame that burned brightly for the next decade, during which a further five All-Irelands were added.
Those who link Mickey Harte with the demise of Gaelic football and of blanket defences may put their fingers in their ears again now. First and foremost, Mickey wanted footballers.
The central drive was about perfecting the skills of the game.
In what seems like a lifetime ago, Mickey used to take much of the training himself.
It was almost entirely football-based. Any player knows that the training memories that stick most are the gutting sessions.
Those ‘character-building’ ones which bring a team together and are recalled as the making of the team if silverware is won.
There are no such memories from then as both minor and U21 All-Irelands were won with training focused on football. Even the first senior All-Ireland in 2003 was won with precious little of those running sessions.
It was football, football, football.
When you took to the field as a minor, there was no taking a few shots or crossbar challenge and certainly no ‘activation’ drills.
Out on the pitch before training started you got a partner and hit kickpasses, nothing else.
Back and forth. Left foot, right foot, punt, outside and inside of boot, whatever, you just kept kicking.
Into training and it was skills and games from there to the end. Mickey’s second tenet was the demand of endless workrate from every player on the pitch.
He demanded ad nauseam that his best defenders and hardest workers should be numbers 13 and 15.
On one occasion, when doing video analysis, Owen Mulligan wasn’t paying the best of attention.
So Mickey asked him what was missing from the particular clip we were watching. Mugsy, snapping away from whatever he was at, looked around and says ‘Eh, workrate Mickey?’. We all laughed.
Of course he was right, everything began and ended with workrate.
If it sounds bleak, it wasn’t.
The workrate across the team and the ‘psychos for the ball’ attitude he demanded were fuelled by Harte’s driven personality. That personality is his most unique aspect.
In terms of belief and single mindedness, it is formidable. Back then it transferred to the team a complete belief that we were as good as anything in the country.
Such an attitude to us seemed normal, yet in reality and in hindsight it should not have been so firmly held by players from a county so rarely seen dining at the game’s top table.
It was viewed as arrogance by many, especially the superpowers of the game and famously earned the team its ‘nouveau riche’ tag. It was that type of mentality, however, that was key to many of our biggest victories.
It wasn’t just some determination we had made as a squad coming into those big games. It was a genuinely held core belief that had been given to us since we were 16 years old.
When I think of those early days I see so many little things that Harte was doing and saying that implanted themselves deeply within the character of that team. I remember a classic clip that he used, about a rugby play by Keith Wood.
In it, Wood was lauded for making a crucial and unexpected play.
The technicalities of the actual rugby move escape me now but the message was clear. Step outside your box, do what is needed, think, be creative, have courage and lead.
Given how the game has changed, those attributes are lesser seen now.
So often we divide players into workers or grafters. Mickey didn’t accept this. He expected players to be both and it became a key reason to the success which followed.
Away from the pitch, another core value instilled by Harte was the honour of representing your county and the need to carry yourself accordingly.
This wasn’t just when on team activities, he expected players to behave appropriately across every sphere of their life. Of course, as young lads and men, the standards were broken – more than once – but the expectation was constantly there.
They were seemingly silly things like wearing a shirt and tie to minor championship games, of togging out in perfect strip, then folding the jerseys neatly back afterwards and of decorum when away with the team.
All these wee things, and a 101 more, created a bond within a group of young fellas that made travelling the length and breadth of the country –
Mickey always in his place at the front of the bus – an absolute joy and led to the numerous highs that will be widely recounted over the coming days and weeks.
Shared with these highs, the team’s journey was inexplicably linked with desperate lows.
The tragic losses of brilliant team-mates, of team-mate’s family members and of course Mickey’s beloved Michaela have become as much part of the team’s story as the success.
It has weaved a togetherness in the group that maintains to this day.
As past players we often get slagged about loyalty to Mickey and avoiding criticising him in public, but given his role in what we all achieved, a touch of loyalty and respect is easy carried.
For the team that marked the beginning of the era, he will always be there at the front of the bus: indefatigable, indomitable, unshakeable.
