Donnelly hopes epic battles will stand to Tyrone Minors

TYRONE minors left it a little close for comfort at times in the Ulster Championship, but manager Gerard Donnelly hopes they’ll be all the better for the experience as they get ready for Saturday’s All-Ireland quarter-final showdown against Kerry.

They required a penalty shoot-out to shake off Donegal in a marathon semi-final contest, and their Ulster final showdown against Derry hung in the balance until Eoin McElholm’s injury-time goal settled matters in Tyrone’s favour.

It hasn’t been easy on the nerves, but Donnelly believes that his lion-hearted young side will have benefited from their gruelling run to provincial honours.

“Those tight games are only great when you come out on the right side of it, I’d rather watch on from the sideline with a 15-point lead, but it’s definitely been character-building from the lads.

“In the Donegal game in particular, we went through the mill, and we just couldn’t get rid of Derry in the
final and that’s a credit to them, we were delighted to hear the final whistle.”

The Kingdom were soundly defeated by Cork in the Munster final, but the interesting thing is that it was a total turnaround from their previous meeting a fortnight earlier, when James Costello’s side trounced Cork by 1-16 to 0-5 points in the semi-final. Donnelly says too much shouldn’t be inferred from their flat performance in the Munster final.

“It’s difficult for lads to keep their focus after hammering a team. James Costello gave an interview in one of Kerry’s local papers and that’s exactly what he said, that it’s difficult for lads to ignore that they’d already beaten the same team. Kerry looked really good in that first game against Cork and we know we’re going to get a backlash this Saturday.”

Maybe it’s overstating things to say that Tyrone have the Indian sign over Kerry, but the seniors have claimed a couple of recent wins over the Kingdom (in last year’s unforgettable All-Ireland semi-final and this year’s league clash) while Tyrone’s u-20 team claimed a deserved win in the last four of the All-Ireland back in May. Donnelly doesn’t believe those positive results will have any bearing on Saturday’s meeting of the two teams.

“Put it this way, if Kerry had beaten us in the u-20s or at senior level I wouldn’t be using it as motivation. I imagine the Kerry manager’s whole thing will be the prospect of bouncing back from their Munster final defeat, given some lads didn’t perform to their best. The senior and u-20 results involved different squads and management so that doesn’t have any bearing on what we do.”

While Donnelly would naturally relish another shot at the All-Ireland after losing last year’s final to Meath by a single point, he says the long-term objective remains feeding players through to the u-20 and senior ranks.

“That’s our whole thing. We lost an All-Ireland final last year and I heard Michael Rafferty and Ruairi McHugh say they didn’t want to lose another one after they moved up to the u-20s and won the All-Ireland.

“If we can get another seven or eight lads into Paul Devlin’s squad next year, that’d be brilliant. Ultimately we want to get lads playing for Tyrone into senior level and playing in these big matches in Ulster and beyond will only benefit them.”