IF THERE IS ONE shared quality about those operating at top-level sport, it is their ability to look at a situation and apply absolute logic and truth.
So, when Paddy Tally speaks at the launch of the Ulster senior football championship, with his Derry side part of the opener against Donegal, and he references ‘next year’, you understand where he is coming from.
Sunday’s meeting of Derry and Donegal should be a classic, like so many encounters between these two have been. In essence, you have Derry, who put Ulster titles together back to back in 2022 and 2023, against the side that dethroned them on their own soil in 2024, before claiming the crown for themselves.
But Gaelic football is a cruel business and things can turn very fast. Donegal exploited the cavalier approach of Derry last year and what then-selector Gavin Devlin termed as his desire to ‘crush’ Donegal, bravely admitting that this attitude was fed by his own ego.
The result was that Derry ended up buried under an avalanche of Donegal goals, with goalkeeper Odhran Lynch horrifyingly caught out of position repeatedly. The failure to make in-game adjustments was baffling and it was a blow that Mickey Harte and Derry never recovered from in 2024.
Managements change. The confidence of players can soon recover. But Derry went looking for new management, and the criteria didn’t change from their appointment of Harte; they wanted someone who had won an All-Ireland.
Their options were limited however. If the Derry footballing entity was a midlands county, then they would have a queue of suitors. But not everyone can make themselves available to get to Owenbeg at least three times a week.
In the end, they made a very shrewd appointment with Paddy Tally. He has been in Derry before and understands the culture. He has also been with Kerry for the three years before, helping to restructure their defence and land Sam Maguire in 2022.
But there were early difficulties.
He was confirmed in the middle of November.
The GAA’s own rules state that no county could return to training until 7 December. You’d be a wide-eyed innocent if you thought everyone sticks to that. Instead, some counties had two hard months’ work achieved up to that point.
“You’ve basically four weeks to get ready for the start of a national league, and that’s really essentially what it was,” says Tally.
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“We started training around the 8th of December and you had…you just barely get to know the players. You had Christmas off and you had four weeks to get a league match under brand new rules. So there’s an awful lot to deal with.
“Plus then we had, as I said earlier on, an awful legacy of injuries that were coming to us as well. So it’s been a real turmoil.”
Most managers moaning about an injury list test the patience of supporters. In Derry’s case though, it’s been catastrophic.
Think of the team that went back-to-back in Ulster. This weekend, they will be without Chrissy McKaigue who has retired, but also Conor McCluskey and Gareth McKinless for certain, and probably Brendan Rogers.
That’s four All-Star footballers. All gone from the defence. Add in the periods missing throughout the league of Lachlan Murray, Niall Loughlin, Ciaran McFaul and Odhran Lynch and you see where this is heading.
“It does leave you on the back foot and that’s what’s made us come back to hurt us in the league this year,” says Tally.
“But it’s something now to be really aware for next season, that you must better prepare yourself.”
Next season. You get the sense that there’s a whole load of realism just entered the conversation.
Given that his association with teams in the conversation for the All-Ireland goes back to 2003 when he was a virtually unheard of coach that Mickey Harte put his faith in, through All-Ireland appearances as a coach with Down, some time spent with Galway, there as a coach for Kerry’s All-Ireland win in 2022, he’s ideally placed to tell us what dominant factors make the winning teams.
As coach to Tyrone with Mickey Harte in 2003. INPHO
INPHO
“The athletic development of the players is so important now and you don’t really find this out until you’re in the later stages of the championship, maybe in Croke Park in the last eight,” says Tally.
“The teams that are more athletically gifted and stronger and bigger really stand out in those days. And not only having 15 really very athletic good footballers, you need another seven or eight on the bench that can come on and strengthen the team when needed. That great Dublin team won All-Irelands because of their bench.
“Armagh won the All-Ireland last year because of their bench. They made the difference when it came to the semi-final and final. They ran out the winners, and those things just don’t happen overnight.”
He suggests that the players coming at 17, 18 years of age are placed on programmes that truly maturate when that player is 22, 23. Missing a year here and there makes it almost impossible for them to develop into frontline players.
“I would say long-term planning, strategic development of players, long-term athletic development is going to be a big focus for teams for the future and especially now with the new rules,” he adds.
And what lessons did he take from his time in Kerry?
“Probably that senior team was the most important thing, that everything revolves around that team,” he says.
“There’s no such thing as taking a chance on a player. If the players need to be looked after during the time to get ready to play football for Kerry, that’s the way it’s going to be. I think every county has to adapt that approach.
“If you want to be competitive at the top level, if you’re an inter-county senior footballer and you’re playing in those number of years you’re at that top level, you have to be able to dedicate your entire football to that time and obviously your club as well.
“When you’re a county player, you’re a county player full on, and in that squad of players, whether you have 25 or 30 players, that has to be their entire priority during that season.”
James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
Derry are different from Kerry. Vastly different.
For a whole host of clubs, winning a Derry title means they immediately enter the Ulster club fray as a team to be watched. Glen winning an All-Ireland senior after coming from no championship wins a couple of years before changes a lot.
And they have a whole group of dual players in Slaughtneil, such as Brendan Rogers and Shane McGuigan, who have designs on winning an All-Ireland club hurling title.
“You’re really trying to manage a lot of factors there. But I think this year it’s going to be a big learning experience for me personally and our medical team and everybody around it and our coaches to understand this is the complexity of Derry. It’s quite unique,” Tally says.
Looking back to their championship defeat to Donegal last summer is a painful place that Tally admitted they would revisit.
But with so many players absent, you’d wonder if there even is a point to that.
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'An awful legacy of injuries' - How Derry have been hit hard ahead of Donegal rematch
IF THERE IS ONE shared quality about those operating at top-level sport, it is their ability to look at a situation and apply absolute logic and truth.
So, when Paddy Tally speaks at the launch of the Ulster senior football championship, with his Derry side part of the opener against Donegal, and he references ‘next year’, you understand where he is coming from.
Sunday’s meeting of Derry and Donegal should be a classic, like so many encounters between these two have been. In essence, you have Derry, who put Ulster titles together back to back in 2022 and 2023, against the side that dethroned them on their own soil in 2024, before claiming the crown for themselves.
But Gaelic football is a cruel business and things can turn very fast. Donegal exploited the cavalier approach of Derry last year and what then-selector Gavin Devlin termed as his desire to ‘crush’ Donegal, bravely admitting that this attitude was fed by his own ego.
The result was that Derry ended up buried under an avalanche of Donegal goals, with goalkeeper Odhran Lynch horrifyingly caught out of position repeatedly. The failure to make in-game adjustments was baffling and it was a blow that Mickey Harte and Derry never recovered from in 2024.
Managements change. The confidence of players can soon recover. But Derry went looking for new management, and the criteria didn’t change from their appointment of Harte; they wanted someone who had won an All-Ireland.
Their options were limited however. If the Derry footballing entity was a midlands county, then they would have a queue of suitors. But not everyone can make themselves available to get to Owenbeg at least three times a week.
In the end, they made a very shrewd appointment with Paddy Tally. He has been in Derry before and understands the culture. He has also been with Kerry for the three years before, helping to restructure their defence and land Sam Maguire in 2022.
But there were early difficulties.
He was confirmed in the middle of November.
The GAA’s own rules state that no county could return to training until 7 December. You’d be a wide-eyed innocent if you thought everyone sticks to that. Instead, some counties had two hard months’ work achieved up to that point.
“You’ve basically four weeks to get ready for the start of a national league, and that’s really essentially what it was,” says Tally.
“We started training around the 8th of December and you had…you just barely get to know the players. You had Christmas off and you had four weeks to get a league match under brand new rules. So there’s an awful lot to deal with.
Most managers moaning about an injury list test the patience of supporters. In Derry’s case though, it’s been catastrophic.
Think of the team that went back-to-back in Ulster. This weekend, they will be without Chrissy McKaigue who has retired, but also Conor McCluskey and Gareth McKinless for certain, and probably Brendan Rogers.
That’s four All-Star footballers. All gone from the defence. Add in the periods missing throughout the league of Lachlan Murray, Niall Loughlin, Ciaran McFaul and Odhran Lynch and you see where this is heading.
“It does leave you on the back foot and that’s what’s made us come back to hurt us in the league this year,” says Tally.
“But it’s something now to be really aware for next season, that you must better prepare yourself.”
Next season. You get the sense that there’s a whole load of realism just entered the conversation.
Given that his association with teams in the conversation for the All-Ireland goes back to 2003 when he was a virtually unheard of coach that Mickey Harte put his faith in, through All-Ireland appearances as a coach with Down, some time spent with Galway, there as a coach for Kerry’s All-Ireland win in 2022, he’s ideally placed to tell us what dominant factors make the winning teams.
“The athletic development of the players is so important now and you don’t really find this out until you’re in the later stages of the championship, maybe in Croke Park in the last eight,” says Tally.
“The teams that are more athletically gifted and stronger and bigger really stand out in those days. And not only having 15 really very athletic good footballers, you need another seven or eight on the bench that can come on and strengthen the team when needed. That great Dublin team won All-Irelands because of their bench.
“Armagh won the All-Ireland last year because of their bench. They made the difference when it came to the semi-final and final. They ran out the winners, and those things just don’t happen overnight.”
He suggests that the players coming at 17, 18 years of age are placed on programmes that truly maturate when that player is 22, 23. Missing a year here and there makes it almost impossible for them to develop into frontline players.
“I would say long-term planning, strategic development of players, long-term athletic development is going to be a big focus for teams for the future and especially now with the new rules,” he adds.
And what lessons did he take from his time in Kerry?
“Probably that senior team was the most important thing, that everything revolves around that team,” he says.
“If you want to be competitive at the top level, if you’re an inter-county senior footballer and you’re playing in those number of years you’re at that top level, you have to be able to dedicate your entire football to that time and obviously your club as well.
“When you’re a county player, you’re a county player full on, and in that squad of players, whether you have 25 or 30 players, that has to be their entire priority during that season.”
Derry are different from Kerry. Vastly different.
For a whole host of clubs, winning a Derry title means they immediately enter the Ulster club fray as a team to be watched. Glen winning an All-Ireland senior after coming from no championship wins a couple of years before changes a lot.
And they have a whole group of dual players in Slaughtneil, such as Brendan Rogers and Shane McGuigan, who have designs on winning an All-Ireland club hurling title.
“You’re really trying to manage a lot of factors there. But I think this year it’s going to be a big learning experience for me personally and our medical team and everybody around it and our coaches to understand this is the complexity of Derry. It’s quite unique,” Tally says.
Looking back to their championship defeat to Donegal last summer is a painful place that Tally admitted they would revisit.
But with so many players absent, you’d wonder if there even is a point to that.
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