'We were blown away': How the Dubs discovered their hard edge through Tyrone battles

The 42

28-06-2025

IF TYRONE WERE looking to get up the noses of Dublin, then they did it as fast as they could.
Acting the maggot, mind-games, scampish behaviour or shit-housery, call it what you want. Tyrone didn't mind. They didn't care.
On their very first championship meeting, the All-Ireland semi-final of 1984, Tyrone emerged from the Croke Park dressing rooms first.
As they posed for the team photograph, three seated figures on the left side, Sean Donnelly, Noel McGinn and John Lynch's knees were jumping up and down, mad for action.
They went straight for Hill 16 to do their warm-up.
Four minutes later, Dublin emerged. No team picture. Straight down to the Hill. Booing and jeering everywhere.
'Dublin seem to be trying to evict the Tyrone men from the goal down on the left,' said Miceál O'Hehir in his commentary. Dublin fans unfurled a banner that read, 'TYRONE POWER IS DEAD.'
The two teams carried on warming up half-ignoring each other. The Dublin team belatedly went for their picture as scuffles between Dublin fans broke out on the Hill. Gardai came in to sort it out and were chased away with stones and other missiles.
Let's call it, 'The Mill On The Hill.'
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Six years later and both teams received an unlikely invitation. The Irish Festival Committee of Toronto, Canada, wanted a headline act.
They thought they might invite Cork and Mayo to reprise their All-Ireland final some seven months previous. But the two had actually agreed to play a friendly that weekend in Griffin Park, the then home of Brentford AFC.
So the Toronto crowd went for the beaten semi-finalists: Tyrone and Dublin.
Tyrone manager Art McRory knew of the 18-year-old Peter Canavan, who had yet to play a dozen games of senior football. He brought him along for the experience.
At the start of the second half, some hardchaw had seen enough of this young upstart. Canavan was laid out with a punch to the throat.
The Toronto Skydome was spectacularly ill-suited to host a game of Gaelic football. The surface was like polished concrete. The O'Neills football hopped around like a ping-pong ball. Players wore big spongy tennis shoes as well as pads for their knees and elbows.
At one point, Sean Donnelly took a swing of his boot at Ciaran Duff. He missed him. Undeterred, he took another one and caught him flush. Referee Miceál Greenan of Cavan felt the whole thing was an impossible task.
Later, as the green beer flowed and the teams drank together, Duff and Donnelly got on famously, even rolling up Duff's jeans to get a picture of Donnelly pointing at the point of contact.
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The 1995 All-Ireland final left a scar that's still visible on Tyrone.
Defeat was one thing. To be defeated and feel that referee Paddy Russell unfairly punished Peter Canavan for touching the ball on the ground as he teed Seanie McLaughlin up for a potential equaliser left them seething.
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Peter Canavan. © Tom Honan / INPHO © Tom Honan / INPHO / INPHO
Then there was the Charlie Redmond business. Russell had yellow carded him twice but he didn't leave the field for some time.
The following morning, an RTÉ phone-in had Tyrone midfielder Feargal Logan calling in to tell people to lay off Redmond. Only, it wasn't Logan at all.
Shithousery.
Soon after that defeat, a number of Tyrone Gaels came together and decided to put a bit of strategy into the undoubted passion that existed in the county.
They formed the beginnings of what would become Club Tyrone, the body behind the fundraising that delivered the Garvaghey training centre.
At underage, Mickey Harte was the minor manager. He was struggling. Worse was to come the following season as he lost his first-round Ulster match to Fermanagh in Omagh.
He persisted. There were some good young lads coming through with names like McGuigan, McGinley, O'Neill, Mulligan, McAnallen, Hughes. You'd never know.
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The next time they met, all had changed. Utterly.
Tyrone were All-Ireland champions. The manager was a conservative figure, presiding over a band of punk pirates.
Dublin were, for many, figures of fun. Under Tommy Carr and Tommy Lyons they we in their peak arse-boxing banter era.
When Paul 'Pillar' Caffrey graduated from selector under Lyons to becoming the manager, Tyrone were the benchmark. But before they could present their front garden to the Tidy Towns Committee, they had to sort out the backyard.
'My mindset, and I had fed it back down into the team, was that we had slipped well back in Leinster,' says Caffrey now.
'We had won one Leinster title in nine years so we very much said, 'Lads, to give ourselves a chance of knocking on the door of an All-Ireland, we need to validate our position as the number one team in Leinster.'
Since 1995, Dublin had only won their province in 2002.
Dublin scraped one in 2005. They were about to take off Mossy Quinn in the final against Laois before the late Davy Billings convinced Pillar he should keep on the Vincent's man in the event of a late '45. Lo, it happened. Mossy nailed it. Champions.
'In year one, we were very content. We had won Leinster and the bonus was that we were going to have a crack at it. We didn't feel we could stare these teams in the face, but we had to start winning Leinster titles with a bit of credibility, so we could challenge for an All-Ireland.
Mickey Harte with Paul Caffrey. INPHO INPHO
'It was slightly different. We weren't brazen enough to think we could win an All-Ireland back then.'
Tyrone was a test.
'We were a very nice team. We had a lot of very talented footballers. But we didn't have an edge to us,' he says.
'So we met Tyrone and we saw the hard edge they had. We were blown away by that. We weren't at the races physically with them. We had to evolve and get learning and get a bit of analysis about us to see if we could survive in the arena against Tyrone.
'There would have been an element of verbals there and whatever you could get away with. We learned from Tyrone and felt we knew where we had to get to, to contest an All-Ireland.'
He adds: 'We needed to start working on it and it's natural for some fellas. We talked about it. We coached it. And some guys were uncomfortable with going into the dark arts, a bit of sledging, off the ball stuff, physicality or whatever.
'Some guys just want to go out and play ball, and that's fine. But to match Tyrone, we had to learn quickly and grow up a little bit.'
What of Tyrone and their thoughts of Dublin?
As a player, Mickey Harte had never played them. Not once. The club fallout with St Ciaran's Ballygawley in 1982 left him in exile for '84.
But he had his thoughts.
'There was a fight in them always. I think it was just after we won the All-Ireland we had them in a league match in Parnell Park and they laid into us in some tune. Brian Dooher might have had his chin split that day,' recalls Harte.
'It was heavy duty stuff really and we had more of that up in Omagh a few years later in the so-called 'Battle of Omagh.' Which I think was much exaggerated really.
'The biggest damage was done that day was a jersey ripped down the middle. I don't think there were any serious blows struck in the melee, but the media highlighted it.
'But we always felt we could beat Dublin. They were a force alright, and they probably missed the boat a few times. They had a decent team at the time.
'What I liked about them was that they were battlers, number one, they never made life easy for you. And I felt the crowd were good; they would get behind them to the hilt. But when they couldn't get the better of us they were very honourable.'
Back to the Battle of Omagh. Tyrone got the better of Dublin in that two-game series in 2005. They went on to win their second All-Ireland. Going up to Omagh was to be a test of their manhood. Not an inch. Not even a fraction; that was the message.
Alan Brogan went after the Tyrone team doctor, Dr Seamus Cassidy. It all kicked off.
Alan Brogan gets involved. Morgan Treacy / INPHO Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
'We had felt we weren't taking our lessons on board here and we needed to lay down a marker. If we were to have an ambition of winning an All-Ireland, we had to back it up. We needed to win back-to-back Leinsters and to meet these guys further down the line, we needed to have a little bit more about us,' reasons Caffrey.
'That day, we felt there would be some spark at some stage. We spoke about it in the build-up. We told them how we wanted them to conduct themselves; we didn't want mass sendings off, but we certainly wanted to show intent that we weren't leaving players isolated, we weren't allowing players get picked on.
'And whatever happens, happens.'
It was coached, it was fed to the players. He doesn't shy away from that.
I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an intent on our part. There was a hard-nosed attitude from us that day. Management laid it down to players and players accepted it that, look, 'this is the first challenge in the lessons of '05. Are we going to take it on a bit, or are we going to be just a nice team?'
'Obviously, the scenes weren't pretty! Privately, I would have been nice and content getting back on that team bus. I'd seen something different in our guys. We were going to partake of the learnings and maybe we can become a hard-nose outfit and it can take us somewhere.'
The outrage was everywhere and subject to radio phone-ins and blanket media coverage.
But working as a Guard, Pillar had seen a few hairy moments in his time. This wasn't one. Not really.
'A lot of it was, as we would call it, handbags. But rather than having handbags and us coming off second best, we got involved.
'There was nobody injured with a box or a boot that day. We did show a physical intent to our game that hadn't been there previously. For our boys, it was a little investment in the belly for coming down the road afterwards; 'We stood up for ourselves today.''
While it was Brogan that got the thing going that day, Caffrey always described him as a lover, not a fighter. He could find a few of those around town.
'You take a man like Denis Bastick. You wouldn't describe him as one of the greatest midfielders Dublin ever had. But certainly in that period he became an effective midfielder.
'He became one of those dogs in that when there was business to be looked after, Denis Bastick was going to be in the middle of it, because he was a hardy buck. He became an enforcer and a minder out in the pitch.'
A quick anecdote about Bastick. Those times must have left a huge impression on him. Many years later, Dublin and Tyrone were playing a Masters final in Ballina, Co Cavan.
Tyrone had a late free coming in. Bastick was sent on before it was taken. With the ball on the way to goal, Bastick struck out and caught a Tyrone player. An instant red card. He lasted around half a second.
During the Jim Gavin era, when opposition teams were searching around to level the playing field a little, the influence of Hill 16 was analysed. But even before that, Harte was warning his players about how to treat it.
'You always needed to talk to your players about the Hill. It's a boost to them and the idea is, 'Can you tame them long enough that they don't get the chance to sing?'' asked Harte.
'You need to be at Dublin early, don't let them have a chance to get ahead of you because when that swings into action it is definitely a boost.
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'Even the '05 game we played, the replay, we had a decent lead at half time and they came back at us in the second half. It felt like they were sucking the ball over the bar. Shane Ryan kicked a point from 60 yards and you thought to yourself that the crowd just sucked the ball over the bar!
'They came back at us in that game and I remember turning to Tony Donnelly on the line and remarking the effect the crowd were having on the game. You just felt that was happening.
'You had to break the momentum. Mugsy's (Owen Mulligan) goal silenced them a bit and then he silenced them a bit. The stance said it all!'
That was Mulligan's goal in the 2005 replay. The goal in the first game has already been well-documented this week.
Typical of Harte, while he acknowledges the individual brilliance of Mulligan, he also points to the role played by others.
'Well see, there was a lot of things in that, that people missed. Ultimately it was about Mugsy. It was an individual act on his behalf to get that goal.
'I have watched this numerous times. It started with a Dublin attack. Brian McGuigan blocked down Alan Brogan. Then it came back to Ricey. To Davy, to Stevie O'Neill who controlled the ball so delicately but never got total control of it. Then it was a toe-poke by Sean Cavanagh. Stevie made the pass then.
'When Mugsy got the ball he was the only man inside the Dublin 50 yard line. But Peter Canavan had just came on before that. Enda McGinley was out around the middle of the field and some way involved in the recovery.
'Him and Peter were running there and that's why Mugsy's dummies were bought so much; there was so much attention on who was coming on the inside.
'Peter's presence going into goals, Enda coming all that way, because of the presence of those two players it gave him the ability to sell those wholesale. It was a great finish and he played with great control when he got the ball. It will be remembered as a great individual goal, but it's also reflective of some brilliant team play.'
Then came 2008. Dublin had given Wexford a 23-point hammering in the Leinster final. Tyrone were stumbling through the back-door and fetched up in the quarter-final, headlining the Sunday events.
Justin McMahon and Diarmuid Connolly. Billy Stickland / INPHO Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
'Diarmuid Connolly came on the scene, I gave him his debut that year,' says Caffrey.
'I just felt offensively we were going to be a different animal. We probably put in our best performance under me in the Leinster final when we gave Wexford an awful trimming.
'And then we got this pissy wet quarter-final weekend. We were the last game on and Tyrone had come through the backdoor and were hardened. We were the right team for them on the day and had a great goal chance early on in the game and we overplayed it.
'They went up the other end and two goal chances, bang-bang. It was one of those days you feel you are a mile off it.
'For me, I felt we weren't making progress and I had to go before I was asked to go. I had been around that dressing room for seven years, manager for four and that's how it ended for me.'
Under Pat Gilroy, Dublin kept adding layer upon layer. In 2010 they were more hard-nosed than Tyrone and got the better of them. In 2011, they retired a fleet of frontline players for Tyrone with a trimming.
They've been doing it ever since, most notably their 2018 All-Ireland final win.
Still, Tyrone came back to win the All-Ireland in 2021. Dublin succeeded them 12 months later.
Both teams are in a different place now. Maddening inconsistency has been the story of their seasons so far.
We don't know where either team are, until they face each other on Saturday night.
They'll bring the very best and very worst out of each other.
Again. And again.