ALL-IRELAND SFC THIRD QUALIFYING ROUND: Brian McGuigan's return to the Tyrone side after some horrific injuries will tug on many hearts in Croke Park this afternoon , reports Keith Duggan

SOMETIMES sport is important for reasons that are not immediately connected to the game. The Sunday that Tyrone hosted Mayo on April last was one such occasion. When the home team took the field, it marked the day that Brian McGuigan made his first start for the county team after two-and-a-half years spent fighting two grave football injuries that might have cost him his health as well as his future in the game. The applause that rippled through Healy Park was warm and heartfelt.

Tyrone, more than most GAA counties, have known the fates to brush tragically against their young footballers in the last decade, from the minor star Paul McGirr, died a decade ago, to the nationally mourned death of Cormac McAnallen, who died in his sleep at the age of 24.

McGuigan played on teams with both of those young men and, like many of his peers, was forced to try and weigh the general importance placed on football against the incomprehensible abruptness of the death of his two mates.

Tyrone's triumphant return to form in the 2005 All-Ireland championship, a victorious season that might have been an ode to McAnallen and marked the county's second title in three seasons, seemed like an affirmation of the healing powers of sport.

Transformed in their replay against Dublin, Tyrone simply got better and better, edging out Armagh in a classic semi-final and saving their very best for Kerry in the final. Although Peter Canavan was hailed as the leading man of that revival, signing off with that glorious September goal, it began to dawn on people as Indian summer gave way to autumn that the quiet Ardboe man was the architect behind it all. McGuigan was in transcendent form playing in his customary centre-half-forward position that afternoon.

He plays with a laconic style that draws comparisons with his father, Frank, but the stamp he will leave on the sport is all his devising. That September, Tyrone looked like an invincible force.

But things happen. Canavan, as widely anticipated, retired and the big question was whether Tyrone could function without his unruffled brilliance. But then, in January of 2006, McGuigan broke a leg playing for Ardboe against Dromore. It was a ferocious injury, breaking both his tibia and fibula. Shortly afterwards bone marrow seeped into his lungs, a grave complication that required emergency treatment in the Belfast Royal Hospital.

He spent 15 weeks with his leg framed in a cage and he became a familiar figure on the fringes of the Tyrone football team, hobbling in and out of the tunnel in Healy Park, his championship summer a write-off.

A depleted Tyrone team were knocked out by Laois in 2006 but were expected to return to form last year. In early May of last year McGuigan travelled with the Ardboe reserves to Aghyaran, in north Tyrone. Although his leg had healed, he subsequently developed a related ankle injury and needed game time.

It is one of the wonders of the GAA that a player of McGuigan's reputation can show up for an obscure junior-grade club match.

The details of how McGuigan got hurt in that match have been hazy. Speaking with Vincent Hogan last year, the player relived those moments as one might recall fragments of a dream.

"I remember kicking the ball and watching it in mid-air. And, in the corner of my eye, I could see this boy going. That's how late he was. I wasn't really paying much attention but the next thing, bang. It wasn't sore. But I just remember going completely blind: just pure black. They were pouring water over the eye. 'You're split open,' they said. I told them I couldn't see anything."

He was rushed to Altnagelvin hospital and was soon given the bleakest prognosis: his consultancy team feared the quality of vision in his right eye would be less that 50 per cent.

It wasn't simply his football career that was in question but his qualify of life.

While Tyrone embarked on another stop-start championship adventure, McGuigan had to lie absolutely still in his bedroom, such was the fragility of his reconstructed eye.

Word of his abject bad luck began to spread.

Mickey Harte said the matter of whether McGuigan would play football again had become irrelevant; it was whether he could enjoy full health again that mattered.

Privately, Harte must have wondered how much more adversity his players would be able to cope with. McGuigan's troubles may not have been directly life-threatening but they were surely another example of the seemingly random cruelties inflicted on a relatively small and immensely talented generation of Tyrone football players.

McGuigan was one of the band of minor footballers that won the 1998 All-Ireland minor championship - his father had captained the previous county minor team to achieve that feat, in 1973. Cormac McAnallen captained the side and the victory was interpreted as a poignant tribute to McGirr, who had collapsed during a championship match against Armagh the previous summer and died in hospital just hours later.

That generation of Tyrone players went from strength to strength: All-Ireland under-21 honours followed in 2000 and 2001, and by the end of 2003 McGuigan had won his first senior medal and an All Star award.

That impressive array of shining medals spoke volumes for Tyrone football accustomed to leaner times.

If the story of Frank McGuigan, a sublimely gifted footballer regarded with great affection across Ulster, was ultimately one of underachievement and lost possibility, then the younger McGuigan embodied the new, armour-plated confidence that distinguished Tyrone football from its past of glorious underachievement.

Frank McGuigan's career ended when he badly smashed his leg when he drove his car into a wall coming home from a pub one November night in 1984. The injury left him with a limp and, for a time at least, worsened his problems with alcohol, an addiction he subsequently battled to overcome and has spoken of publicly.

McGuigan senior always said he did not regret being unable to play at the highest level as much as he missed being able to kick a ball around with his sons.

All the McGuigan boys could play and while Frank junior shipped the inevitable and burdensome comparisons with his father, the other boys were allowed to develop their talents without as much scrutiny; and after Brian became a regular player on the Tyrone team Frank senior regularly expressed the hope people would judge him in his own right.

Over time, people had no choice but to do that. Famously, McGuigan cut short his travels in Australia to rejoin the senior squad in the summer of 2005. His introduction against Cavan in a replay set the wheels turning again and while Tyrone were always a notoriously moody squad - their season turned on Eoin Mulligan's electrifying goal against Dublin in the quarter-final replay - they jumped into a different class with McGuigan on board.

After the All-Ireland final victory, the former Kerry great John O'Keeffe noted in this newspaper that McGuigan's last point was the definitive score of the game. "It will stay in my head for a long time because of the patience and intelligence with which Tyrone held up the ball."

McGuigan has both those virtues in abundance. He is not a free-wheeling scorer and rarely indulges in the extravagantly flashy play. McGuigan's great skill is to illuminate the truth that Gaelic football is a simple sport - if you have the requisite passing skills and vision.

The younger McGuigan promptly resumed his travels after Tyrone's second All-Ireland celebrations and returned hoping to be a linchpin for the senior team the following year. His descent into that hellish struggle with those injuries led to a more muted assessment of Tyrone's propensity to win more All-Irelands. Peter Canavan's remarks were both an acknowledgement of the Ardboe man's importance and a glum assessment of where Tyrone stood without him.

"He is a pivotal figure. He's a leader and so much comes from him. I think we saw how he made a huge difference in 2005. With McGuigan not there, it leaves Tyrone's task of competing with the bigger teams so much more difficult."

It has been a long, slow road back for McGuigan but his return to full health and to the white-and-red jersey has been a cause for genuine celebration for Tyrone football people.

Today, they face a Mayo side that has had something of an Indian sign on them and although Tyrone have been winning fairly comfortably in the qualifiers, they have not yet looked anything like the supernova side of a couple of years ago.

But they are improving and the return of McGuigan gives them not so much a new dimension as a paradigm shift. And while the retirements of Canavan and O'Neill have often been trumpeted as reasons to dismiss Tyrone's chances out of hand, the exciting form the latest McGuigan, Tommy, has shown this year, gives the team a new option.

Today, then, Brian McGuigan runs out in Croke Park with Tyrone for the first time since he left the field as an All-Ireland champion. For anyone who cares about football or sport, that will be a sight to gladden the heart.