These are words that Niall Morgan hasn’t used in a while: regret, frustration, disappointment. It’s the vocabulary of underachievement, the Tyrone goalkeeper finding himself locked in grim midsummer reflections.
The Red Hands’ bid for back-to-back All-Ireland titles, something the successful Tyrone teams of the 2000s never managed, ended on June 5th when they were “run off the pitch” by Armagh in the qualifiers.
He says it now through gritted teeth but Morgan wouldn’t be surprised to see their conquerors go on and win the All-Ireland.
“I think Armagh are going to get to the final and I wouldn’t be surprised in any way, shape or form if they win it as well,” he said.
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Yet even if the Orchard do it, Tyrone’s implosion will still be one of the stories of the season. So what happened? Morgan pointed to fitness issues.
“We all did our own training during lockdown last year and were all flying fit and then it was just a case of getting the football to piece together,” he said.
“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 fitness caught up with us and we paid the price.”
In some ways, Tyrone were victims of their own success. The All-Ireland win pushed a glut of club fixtures into the back end of last year. Morgan was still playing competitively for Edendork in mid-December. Then came the team holiday, which was quickly followed by the National League. There was little opportunity to take a breather, much less to commit to a heavy block of pre-season training.
Six months on, Tyrone’s critics will claim that their 2022 difficulties prove that they were lucky All-Ireland winners.
“We kept saying we wanted to prove that it wasn’t a fluke but we probably gave everybody the opportunity to say, ‘We told you so’,” lamented Morgan. “Yeah, that definitely hurts because at the end of the day we still had the same starting point as every other team last year. We all had the restrictions at the start, we all got back to training at the same time, even though there were some teams training through the restrictions.
“Then we obviously had the Covid issue (before the All-Ireland semi-final) and there were detractors saying that was a stance we took that we shouldn’t have took but it just doesn’t sit right that people think you won an All-Ireland by fluke, considering if Kerry or Mayo or Dublin had won the All-Ireland it wouldn’t even have been mentioned. So for it to be said about us just because we caught Kerry cold and we played Mayo in a final, it’s more disappointing than hurtful.”
On an individual basis, Morgan admits he probably didn’t max out his own preparations this year.
“I suppose you were putting a bit of extra work on your kick-outs before training last year and a wee bit more on your free kicks after training,” he said. “For example, you wouldn’t have left the training pitch until you scored maybe 10 ‘45s in a row whereas this year you were maybe kicking 10 and being happy with seven or eight going over.”
Morgan’s frustrations were cast into irrelevance at the weekend by the tragic passing of Tyrone hurler Damian Casey.
“We would have been from the same parish,” said Morgan. “When someone has a high profile, there are always begrudgers and people who want to knock them down. Myself and Darren and Conn are obviously high profile and from the same area and you’ll always have people will say something about us. I know there are people who don’t like my personality and stuff but I’ve never heard anybody say a bad word about Damian Casey.”
Niall Morgan was speaking at the launch of AIB’s new series, The Drive, which explores the adversity faced by inter-county players in the modern game and what drives them to pull on the jersey year after year.
