History lessons are always useful when it comes to Tyrone.
So let’s rewind to 2015 — a year when many felt that Mickey Harte was going to be pushed towards the exit door.
Tyrone were relegated from Division One and, from January on, there seemed to be regular reports of players leaving the panel.
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After falling to Donegal in the preliminary round, they became the first county to exit the Ulster Championship.
But look where they ended up.
Tyrone were the last Ulster team left standing, and they pushed reigning champions Kerry hard in the All-Ireland semi-finals.
With 10 minutes left on the clock, the teams were level, but a late scoring burst from Kerry got them over the line.
The reason, though, that Tyrone’s 2015 season is remembered is down to Tiernan McCann’s hair.
Tyrone road-tested a defensive system during the 2015 League and honed it so such an extent that their pacey counter-attacking game ripped Ulster champions Monaghan to shreds in the All-Ireland quarter-finals.
After that game, we should have been talking about Mattie Donnelly and the extraordinary season he was having.
We should have been marvelling at the game intelligence of Peter Harte and the enduring quality of Seán Cavanagh.
We should have been glorying in the elusive movement and clinical finishing of Darren McCurry and Conor McAliskey.
And we should have been celebrating the enduring greatness of Mickey Harte.
Instead, we were. . . well, you don’t need to be told.
In the day afterwards, the noise you heard from the direction of Tyrone was of wagons being circled.
Tyrone’s All-Ireland quarter-final with Monaghan was a nasty, cynical, horrible mongrel of a game.
True, there were some fine passages of play, but it was the playacting and gamesmanship that has put Tyrone in the spotlight.
And not for the first time.
McCann’s theatrical collapse after Monaghan’s Darren Hughes reached out to touch his hair meant that a player many hadn’t heard of a week earlier was now a household name.
On ‘The Sunday Game’, Ciarán Whelan and Colm O’Rourke didn’t hold back. They gave Tyrone what the rugby fraternity would describe as a shoeing.
So how did Tyrone react? They reacted as they always react, by fighting their corner.
Remember the fall-out to another All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Monaghan — that of 2013?
That was the game where Joe Brolly questioned Cavanagh’s manhood because he’d pulled down Conor McManus when he was through on goal.
The Tyrone response was to issue a document, containing a list of ‘facts’ concerning the way they play the game.
Philip Jordan, who won three All-Irelands under Mickey Harte, is a Moy clubmate of Cavanagh.
But, on Twitter, he was far from convinced that this document was a good idea.
“Nothing positive about it, it’s actually embarrassing,’’ he tweeted at the time.
“Might be true but makes us look a bit childish.
“If you need a siege mentality to get motivated for All-Ireland semi you should hand the jersey back.”
But there is plenty of evidence out there that Tyrone have always nurtured grudges and a siege mentality to an extent that other counties wouldn’t even dream of.
A sense of grievance was nurtured last summer that took them all the way to Sam Maguire.
Their All-Ireland semi-final with Kerry was delayed because of a Covid outbreak in the Tyrone camp.
The fall-out was something that rankled with the Red Hands, and they seemed to use it as motivational fuel.
Remember how Brian Dooher, their joint-manager, cut loose after the win over Kerry.
“I don’t want to get into this here now but there’s been a kind of a slant here we’ve tried to pull a fast one,’’ he said.
“It was a factual thing based on the evidence. I don’t want to get into this here but if that’s the way this is going, which it seems to be listening to it, I’m in the wrong place.”
Dooher left the press conference shortly afterwards, leaving Feargal Logan to field the rest of the questions.
Different kinds of questions are crowding around the Tyrone management this summer.
Sunday’s defeat to Armagh means they have had the limpest defence of any All-Ireland champions since the back door was introduced in 2001.
A win over a mid-table Division Three team in Fermanagh, two trimmings by Derry and Armagh — two of their biggest rivals.
It’s a long way away from where they were last summer, and we should remember Mattie Donnelly’s words after they claimed Sam.
“The scary thing is, that team probably isn’t operating at optimum levels yet,” said Donnelly.
“We haven’t reached our ceiling yet, so we have to look at that, and that makes the future exciting.”
Tyrone have since claimed the All-Ireland Under-20 crown, with exciting talents like Michael McGleenan and Ruairi Canavan on board.
So how did they end up falling so far and so quickly at senior level?
There were signs during the League that something just wasn’t right. Over the winter and spring, Ronan O’Neill, Tiernan McCann, Mark Bradley, Lee Brennan, Hugh Pat McGeary, Michael Cassidy and Paul Donaghy left the panel.
There are always comings and goings in intercounty set-ups but to lose seven in a short space of time — and some had huge experience — was strange.
That so many of the key men from last year, like Conor Myler, Kieran McGeary and Niall Sludden, never hit form was doubly strange.
Dooher and Logan won an All-Ireland no-one saw coming in 2021, their limp defence took everyone by surprise too.
Maybe they just didn’t have that grievance to feed off that fuels so many Tyrone teams.
They’ll get the barbs now and, with that, comes that familiar Tyrone bullishness.
Tyrone’s response to a disastrous Championship will tell us where they really stand.
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