O’Rourke braced for whatever Quarter-Final draw throws up

TOP of the group – you can’t say much better than that. At this juncture at least…

Tyrone have booked their spot in an All-Ireland quarter-final in Croke Park in a fortnight’s time by virtue of Sunday’s comfortable vithirteen point vctory over Cavan in Brewster Park. That’s only one half of the story – we had one eye on a frustratingly even group stage clash between Donegal and Mayo but Jim McGuinness’ men did the business, just about, to ensure we avoided those pesky preliminary quarter-finals.

The only sour note from a brilliant all-round day at the office was Michael McKernan’s early exit due to injury, and we’ll deal with that first and foremost.

The Coalisland Na Fianna man had to leave the pitch with a shoulder injury with only three minutes to the clock, and manager Malachy O’Rourke, speaking in the direct aftermath of the game, said it was too early to detail a prognosis.

In happier news, Conor Meyler is back, almost a full two years since he last donned a Tyrone jersey in a competitive match.

An emotional looking Meyler was pictured embracing his mother Paula after the game, and it would be remiss not to note that he looked sharp in his ten minutes on the field of play.

But anyway. All’s well that end’s well after the disappointment of their second-round defeat to Mayo. The dust has settled, Tyrone are in the last eight and who knows where it might all lead.

Manager Malachy O’Rourke commented, “We’re very much focused on what’s ahead of us. They’re all knock-out now, we feel if we get our best performance, we can match anybody. It’s easy saying that so we’ll just concentrate now really hard on the next two weeks and try to put in a really good performance that will give us a chance of getting to a semi-final. That’s all we can do, that’s all under our control and that’s we’ll be going after.”

This is the first time in the three years of the group stages (set to be scrapped in 2026) that Tyrone have managed to avoid the preliminary quarter-finals.

Asked how important it was that they did so, O’Rourke said: “It was important, the week break is massive. It just gives you the extra time to get bodies refreshed, recovered and then get back down to serious work again rather than rushing everything.

“It gives you that bit more time to prepare for whoever we’re coming up against next. We just wanted to top the group and we’re delighted we did.”

While there’s still a lot of football to be played, there’s no doubt that the All-Ireland quarter-final is an important staging post for teams harbouring aspirations of the biggest prize of all. Tyrone will be pitted against one of the teams who come through next weekend’s preliminary quarter-finals and yesterday it was very much a case of job done.

O’Rourke said, “There’s no doubt, that’s exactly what we wanted, we wanted to get to an All-Ireland quarter-final but it’s not easy done, as we found out.

“We knew coming here today that if we beat Cavan we’d give ourselves a good chance of topping the group and going straight through to a quarter-final and that’s what we achieved so I’m delighted.”

The Tyrone manager was also pleased with the overall performance, which was much-improved on their last day out against Mayo.

“There were lots of aspects of the  performance to be very pleased with, there’s other things that we need to work on.
“We started off playing well going forward but we were conceding a wee bit at the back.

“If they converted more of our chances, it would have been a lot closer, but overall, I thought we got a good grip around the middle of the field, started winning more break-ball, and as the game went on we took a stranglehold and never really let it go.

“I’m delighted with the day’s work and delighted to get two weeks to prepare for the quarter-final.”