Plans are currently afoot for a reunion of Tyrone’s 2003 All-Ireland winning team in London this September.
Naturally, all of those involved in that landmark success have been notified and, as is now the norm, a WhatsApp group was established.
However, Paddy Tally, Tyrone’s coach back then and Kerry’s now, left the group no sooner than he had been added.
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“It was probably because of his involvement with Kerry, he didn’t want any conflict of interest,” says Brian McGuigan, the former Tyrone centre-forward.
“But you wouldn’t see Paddy much and you’d see far less of him now because I think he spends most of his time down in Kerry, he seems to have took a year out (of his job).
“Sometimes if you go up to Galbally for youth matches or club matches, there’s Paddy, doing steward and parking cars and stuff and it just shows you the type of man he is - he doesn’t think he’s above anybody or anything.”
Tally was just 29 when Tyrone won that first All-Ireland and was still active on the club scene.
“Paddy was a class forward in his own right playing football,” says McGuigan, which may come as a surprise to many that have pigeon-holed him as a defensive coach.
But there’s no getting away from the fact that defensive rigidity is a key tenet of his coaching - just not the only one.
“A lot of the drills and small-sided games that Paddy did was about you working really hard, whether you’re a forward or a back.
“Even in the wee training drills we were doing where you maybe weren’t putting in the same effort as a defender, he’d have pulled you aside and said, ‘You should be doing the exact same thing as him’.
“Without even realising it, whenever you went into a match, you were putting in those tackles that you wouldn’t have been doing maybe the previous year.”
The famous passage of play in the 2003 All-Ireland semi-final, where Tyrone hunted Kerry down relentlessly along the Hogan Stand sideline, was the ultimate expression of Tally’s work.
“That would have been our training, that would have been Paddy’s wee drills that happened at training all the time,” says McGuigan. “All the time. Those wee conditioned games. That was just a cameo of it.”
The following year, his relationship with Mickey Harte soured and they parted ways. Tally landed in Down in late 2008 and made such an impact that the players pitched for his retention after James McCartan succeeded Ross Carr as manager the following year. They came from nowhere to reach the 2010 All-Ireland final, losing by a point to a far more seasoned Cork team.
“I remember in 2010, he was speaking to me around my fitness and how I was using the ball,” says former Down star Kevin McKernan.
