Time for some hard graft from Tyrone: Burns

FRANK Burns has braced himself for a period of good old fashioned hard work in preparation for Tyrone’s National League Division One opener at home to Monaghan on Sunday week.

The McKenna Cup proved a useful exercise, particularly as a platform for trialling newcomers to the squad, but there’s no doubt that the league is a significantly more important competition and that Tyrone will want to consolidate their Division One status for another year.

Monaghan have a proud record in the top flight – this is their eighth consecutive year of playing Division One football – and they’re always keen to put in a good showing against the Red Hands.

Burns said: “Monaghan is as tough as game as you could get on your first day out. You know what Tyrone and Monaghan games are like – there’s never much between the two sides any time we meet.

“Before that though we have a couple of weeks of hard work at training to be ready for that test.”

The versatile Pomeroy player picked up his first game-time of the year when Tyrone narrowly lost to Armagh last Saturday. It was a much-improved showing from their first day out, when Cavan ran out very comfortable winners indeed.

“After two games we are off to a shaky enough start with two losses but from Tuesday night against Cavan it was definitely a better performance,” said Burns. The new boys that came in acquitted themselves well while the established names were better as well and I suppose it couldn’t have been much worse than Tuesday.”

Burns was also pleased to see a raft of debut players acquit themselves well across Tyrone’s two MccKenna Cup matches.

“There are a lot of new boys all in there chomping at the bit and they are all good players and they are keeping last year’s squad on their toes.

“It’s a great way to be as nobody can afford to rest on their laurels as the new players are all looking their place in the squad and that is the way it should be.

“They have been pushing things on in training and you could see there today especially in the second half that they are all eager to make an impact at this level.”

The dam threatened to burst in the first-half against Armagh but a Conn Kilpatrick goal kept Tyrone in contention and it was a breezily entertaining encounter in the second-half.

Burns says there a lot of room for improvement, but it’s still very early days in the new year.

“At times in the first half we were perhaps holding the ball up too much, we needed men to punch holes in their defence, and Conn did just that with the goal just before halftime.

“That gave us something to build on in the second half and we certainly played better. Armagh though caught us on the counter attack a few times which was disappointing but the moral of the story is that we still have a lot of work to do at this early stage of the season.”