WHEN I was heavily involved with Newington Football Club, we played our home games at Muckamore Park. It was NHS property but, for 10 years or more, we had a fluid arrangement to make the nearby football pitch our home.
In those years, Muckamore Park was, without doubt, the worst facility in the Amateur League Premier Section. While other clubs boasted state-of-the-art facilities, pitches like billiard tables and clubrooms that smelt of new leather and frothy beer, Muckamore was from the dark ages.
We had rickety old mobile changing rooms. I was convinced that, if the entire team sat on one side of the room, you could topple the entire thing from outside with a decent shoulder charge. For safety, we made sure there was an equal amount of people on either side of the changing room.
And if you wanted a hot shower after a game, you needed to be quick because the immersion heater didn’t hold out that long. In the depths of winter, players didn’t mind being substituted because they were guaranteed some warm water before the end of a game.
It was that kind of place. It was truly dire. But we came to love the old field. God knows how it passed the odd inspection. The actual pitch had an awful slope to it, but it looked resplendent beneath August sunshine. By November, it was a muckheap.
There was no escaping the conclusion: Muckamore Park was a dump - but it was our dump. Before one game, we overheard a few of the visiting team describing our facilities as just that - “a dump”.
Gleefully, we used that comment in our pre-match team-talk. We told our players not to disappoint our visitors. Beating our chests, we defiantly growled: ‘Send them back to their comfy leather seats and frothy beer empty-handed!’
We felt like a race apart. We were the downtrodden but proud. Tension was a constant theme between ourselves and the authorities. We loved the fact that other teams felt a terrible sense of foreboding about coming to play at our pitch. It was their least favourite fixture by a country mile.
We won that particular game 3-0. I don’t know if our pre-match talk had any bearing on the outcome of the game. We’d like to think it did. Maybe it was just another empty battle cry. Or maybe it gave us an extra five per cent that the other team didn’t have.
Of course, every player has their own way of motivating themselves, but our siege mentality was like glue that we’d apply to the group 10 minutes before kick-off. When I think of those halcyon days, I think of Tyrone and the amount of material Mickey Harte and his backroom team have accrued over the last few seasons.
While some of Newington’s siege mentality was rooted in the realms of our fertile imagination, it would appear Tyrone’s doesn’t have to be. The Red Hands don’t have to engineer anything to make them paranoid.
The GAA was in the throes of the worst kind of moral panic when Sean Cavanagh rugby-tackled Conor McManus at Croke Park a couple of seasons ago. Likewise when Tiernan McCann stupidly threw himself to the ground against Monaghan last summer.
Not to deflect from these clear examples of cynical play, Tyrone contest the disproportionate nature of the criticism laid at their door. It was as if Tyrone footballers invented the dark arts and that nobody else committed sins quite like on the scale of the Ulster men.
RTE pundits Joe Brolly, Ciaran Whelan and Colm O’Rourke launched stinging criticisms of Tyrone. O’Rourke complained of a “smell” about Tyrone, while Whelan said that the Red Hands should “apologise” for McCann’s antics.
Even the most pristine of juries couldn’t help but be contaminated by the intense negativity swirling around the Tyrone camp. Had Tyrone really become the Uruguay of the All-Ireland Championship?
Or perhaps it’s a little easier to have a go at Tyrone while their manager has the temerity not to talk to the ‘national’ broadcaster. One man’s perceived intransigence is another man’s principles.
An emergent aspect of the Tyrone story is the more Harte’s RTE ban is discussed, the more Harte is depicted as the intransigent one when, in reality, his is the most obvious stance a father in his situation would take. It’s a pity this particular media ban is in constant need of clear-eyed judgement.
In a recent interview, Tyrone assistant manager Gavin Devlin said Tyrone “didn’t need” a siege mentality to be successful. He didn’t even regard Joe Brolly as the proverbial blue-bottle that needed swatting. Smiling, Devlin added that, if Joe wasn’t on The Sunday Game, it wasn’t worth watching.
While there is a growing number of people who seem intent on perpetuating a negative image of Tyrone football, the GAA’s favourite panto villain is coming to get them. They’re right behind Dublin and Kerry. And they will win another All-Ireland soon.
It might be this year. It might be next year. But this group will win the game’s greatest prize. Given that Tyrone were merely a developing team last summer, they should really have beaten Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final.
Perhaps Devlin was being too kind to their eventual conquerors last summer when he said: “I genuinely believe Kerry just got the better of us in the last 10 minutes of that game. That was a learning curve for us. Kerry were just that wee bit better.”
Dublin, Kerry, Tyrone and Mayo are likely to be the teams still standing in late August. Right now, the Dubs love playing Kerry and Mayo because they invariably win. But they don’t like playing Tyrone.
That’s an advantage before a Championship ball has been thrown in. The Red Hands have the talent to go two steps further than last year. And if they need it, they always have that five per cent extra in their back pockets.
