MICKEY HARTE SAYS he wasn’t surprised by the level of Tyrone’s performance in their comprehensive win over Donegal in Clones this afternoon.
Tyrone were impressive winners on a 1-21 to 1-12 scoreline and will be the shorter of the odds come Ulster final day against either Down or Monaghan.
Micky Harte before Sunday’s semi final. Photo Evan Logan
“Absolutely,” the Tyrone manager replied when asked did he see this one coming.
“I am the eternal optimist anyway. I have been seeing that coming for this last year and a half. I knew that some day we would deliver the kind of performance that we are capable of. And of course conditions were fine for us today. We do like the dry sod and hot days in Clones.”
Tyrone scored 0-22 in their Ulster quarter-final win over Derry with 11 different scorers and had 12 names on the scoresheet yesterday as part of their 1-21. Perhaps the most impressive statistic of the lot was all but two of Tyrone’s points from play.
Harte added: “I wouldn’t call it perfect, I think it was impressive, at times, but at other times we made plenty of errors that we need to tidy up on.
“We gave them a bit of a run in the middle of the second half, when they closed the gap with a goal and created a few more goal chances – if some of those had gone in, or their first half goal chance, the complexion of the game could have been so, so different.
“It’s easy to sit now and look at the scoreboard and think we had an easy day out – no we hadn’t. We actually worked very hard for 45-55 minutes and that made the last 15 or 20 not as tense as it might otherwise have been.
“We worked ourselves into that position to be able to see out the game comfortably but if you reflect on the video evidence there’s still plenty of things we could tidy up on.”