THERE is, Mattie Donnelly believes, a big performance brewing in Tyrone if they can find their way into the knockout stages.
At a surface level, you might look at the Red Hands and feel that they’re a step backwards on even 2023. An eight-point win in Ballybofey reversed into a seven-point loss in the space of twelve months, right?
But for 40 minutes on Saturday evening, it was a very different game not only to last year’s, but to their extra-time clash in Celtic Park a month ago.
All the aces stacked up in Tyrone’s favour the first day. They’d seen Donegal’s ambush and countered it by conceding the kickout and setting up.
This time, they went after Donegal. What transpired was a breathless 40 minutes of ping-pong at which point Tyrone were just two down, 0-12 to 0-10.
It was a much better game than the first game. A more testing game for the two teams, more fluid, more open, faster paced.
“We probably had more looks at the posts than we had at Celtic Park this time around, the difference was we probably weren’t as clinical,” said Donnelly.
“I thought we left a lot on the table in the first half. A few poor decisions, a few bad executions, but we still got a lot of looks at the posts.
“Probably when you’re playing Donegal, this version of Donegal, you need to be a bit more clinical than that. Once we got out to a four-point game, it started to slip away, we needed to claw it back and we probably weren’t clinical and that gave them oxygen.”
His reading of it, in the immediate aftermath, was pretty much spot on.
In every facet bar their finishing, Tyrone were holding their own and more. But where Donegal had scored 10 times from 14 shots, Tyrone had kicked 9 from 17 efforts.
It came for them in the last 20 minutes, where Donegal started to expose Tyrone’s man-for-man approach with their hard running.
The worry for the Red Hands is the way in which games have tended to catch up on them over recent seasons. They’ve lost nine second halves in their last 12 championship games.
They were six up on Cavan and three up on Donegal in Celtic Park. Both games went to extra-time. Tyrone won the first and lost the second.
“They’re a very mobile team and they’re good at using every inch of the pitch too and leaving that space for their runners to get in behind. They wait until that gap opens up and they have the leg speed then to hurt you. They’re pretty good then at coming off that runner as well,” says Donnelly.
“They’ve a lot of weapons going forward. We probably gave them lot of oxygen as well with our own attacking play not being as good and as clinical.”
But there are shafts of light. Peter Harte got back in at the weekend. Kieran McGeary played his best game in a few seasons. Donnelly himself continues to defy medical reality.
They wound up in an All-Ireland quarter-final with Kerry last year but never looked likely to win it.
With Clare coming to Omagh this weekend and then Cork at a neutral venue in two weeks’ time, the path in front will become more visible.
“I feel that we’re still in it and I feel that we have a tighter group than we’ve had over the last few years, and we just need to start winning games over the next few weeks and stay in this competition.
“I think we have a big performance in us then down the track if we keep building on that, keep learning, there’s a lot of learning to be taken from the last few games, young and old.
“If we can bring that together and get through and stay alive in the competition, I still think we can give it a rattle. But we still have a lot of work to do.”