Harte seeks strength and power in attacking rebuild

Adding a more physical presence to Tyrone’s forward line is one of the major lessons Mickey Harte learned from 2018.

Harte seeks strength and power in attacking rebuild

Adding a more physical presence to Tyrone’s forward line is one of the major lessons Mickey Harte learned from 2018. The repositioning of Mattie Donnelly and Peter Harte to more advanced positions has been a marked difference in the team’s approach in the league so far and Harte admits they require a better blend of players upfront.

Holding up recent Tyrone forward lines against the county’s greats of the 2000s is unfair, but then compare them and most forward lines to Dublin and they have looked paltry, figuratively and literally. Three-time All-Ireland winning manager Harte is just looking for better balance.

“I suppose we are renowned for having nippy inside forwards that are good on their feet and are nice, accurate players. Maybe we generally had too many of them. So we need to mix and match a bit, a bit more power and a bit more strength. That is definitely something that’s been there for a while.

“We’re always compared to the team that had Stephen O’Neill and Peter Canavan and Brian McGuigan and who else, anybody you want to name, a forward line which had a lot of different high-quality players, but they only come along once in a generation. I think everybody recognises you get those once in a generation, and particularly in numbers. We don’t necessarily have people to compare to them, but what we want is players who can learn from what they saw those boys do and learn to give the best of themselves.”

Mark Bradley has taken a year out for studying and is due back in 2020, and Harte insists he’s not doing away with all his impish forwards.

I am not saying we throw out all our small players, but we need a better balance so you don’t have a line where it is all the same kind of skilful, accurate, fast players who need the precise pass.

"Maybe you need to mix and match with the bigger and stronger player who can handle an average ball.

“You can’t have all the big strong men either, because they wouldn’t be as deft or as astute as finding the scoring opportunities as the Mark Bradleys, the Lee Brennans, the Darragh Canavan or (Darren) McCurry, these boys are all very skillful players, but this is a team game and we need certain horses for courses and certain mixes.”

What Harte admires about Dublin, Tyrone’s opposition in Croke Park on Saturday, is not just their playing personnel but the work of their extensive backroom team.

“It’s a different world they’re living in because I’m not sure that anyone has met what Dublin have to offer in the last five or six years. I think they’ve got lots of quality players, they have lots of capacity to analyse themselves and the opposition, there’s a very strong team around Jim Gavin, a seriously strong team around him, so there’s no much that goes amiss with Dublin.

“I think this is a harder challenge for modern day players to have to deal with what Dublin have to offer. I’m not sure that any players, even our best players of the past, had to deal with all of those things. They had to deal maybe with the footballing prowess generally, but not all the backup and added value that comes nowadays with a high class, organised outfit that Dublin are.”

Harte felt Tyrone gave Dublin a lot of food for thought in the opening quarter of last year’s final.

“I think maybe we surprised them a bit in the first 20 minutes. Probably, we didn’t do enough damage when we had a chance to do it. That would have put us in a better place to deal with their purple patch. The fact that we didn’t get as far ahead as we ought to have done, and then they got these two quickfire goals, relatively speaking. That just turned everything on its head for us. After all the good football we’d played, to go in seven down was very devastating for us.”

Harte knows those 10 minute or so periods before and after half-time are becoming Dublin’s power periods.

“They will be content to play with a team and not be too concerned about the scoreline in the first 20 or 25 minutes, but they do seem to have an injection then of something, it comes at vital stages of the game.”

But for all Dublin’s worth Harte relishes the challenge of toppling them. “I see it as a possible outcome that they could go on and win this fifth All-Ireland and there is no reason to doubt that they couldn’t do that. But I also believe that if we all felt that this was an impossible task, we would be doing ourselves and the country at large a disservice.”

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