It often takes a full winter of reflection before the reasons behind a botched All-Ireland defence become fully apparent, but Niall Morgan has already pinpointed Tyrone’s.
This weekend, the All-Ireland quarter-finals will go ahead without the reigning champions for the first time since 2006, when an injury-ravaged Tyrone couldn’t make it through the qualifiers. Their failures this year were more multi-layered, however.
“I think we trained three times before we went on our team holiday and then you were straight back in,” Morgan begins. “So you were always playing catch-up.
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“In hindsight, we probably would have looked at the first couple of League games and seen it as a chance to just run new faces and get plenty of training under our belt and get ready for the Championship but I suppose we went in trying to not win the League but get safe early and it almost backfired on us.
“We drew with Monaghan on a horrible night, we got a good hammering by Armagh and then we sort of gathered ourselves but we never really got that catch-up period whereas last year we all did our own training during lockdown and were all flying fit and then it was just a case of getting the football piece together.
“It stood to us whereas this year we didn't have that, for want of a better word, background of fitness that we had last year. We just didn't have the work done and it showed come the end of the year. We just weren't fit enough. We were run off the pitch by Derry.
“We were run off the pitch by Armagh and even to an extent Fermanagh outran us for large periods of that game too. I think just the footballing ability shone through on that day but it caught up with us and we paid the price.”
