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THE opening night draw at home to fourteen man Kildare has underlined for Tyrone manager Malachy O’Rourke how difficult it will be to claw their way out of the Division Two ranks.
Ahead of their trip to Celtic Park to tackle old adversaries Derry this Saturday evening the Red Hand boss has stressed that no gifts will be freely handed out to his team in their quest to go straight back up again.
With neither having won their opening games the promotion prospects of both Tyrone and Derry will definitely suffer a significant blow if either emerge on the losing side, and O’Rourke is therefore demanding an improved showing on the Lilywhites encounter.
“ It’s going to be a really tough game. We’d be hoping to get a few lads back but Derry have a very strong team. They were beaten by Meath so they will be looking to get two points the next day. It’s a big challenge for us but that is what it is all about and we have to regroup and get ourselves ready for it.
“ You seen straight away in the first weekend that teams are going to take points off each other so it’s going to be a dogfight. They are all good teams in this Division.
“ They are physically fit and strong so it’s an important game. We will just have to dust ourselves down, prepare really well during the week and try to get a good performance.”
Tyrone really only showed glimpses of their true potential in the second half against Kildare, after a fairly insipid display prior to the interval, and while agreeing that a lot of his side were fairly inexperienced at this level, O’Rourke wasn’t looking to make any excuses.
“ We had a young team out and it’s a great lesson for them. Hopefully we will learn from it but at the same time that level of performance won’t be good enough going forward. We have to try and push on.
“ I suppose we did get a point out of it from being three points down at half-time but overall we were hoping to get the win.
“ We knew right from the start (of the League) there was going to be nothing easy. We knew that Kildare were going to be a tough proposition and that’s how it proved.”
The plus point for Tyrone supporters last Saturday was the introduction after the break of the likes of Darragh Canavan, Brian Kennedy and Eoin McElholm to help spearhead the revival. The manager hopes that others will be available too for the trip to Derry.
“ The problem is we can’t rush them either but it was great to get the likes of Brian and Darragh on as well as Eoin McElholm who have played very little football this year. It was great to get them in and we will see how the others are during the week to see if they can come back as well hopefully.”
