THIS year, for the first time, Mickey Harte is wearing an ear piece on the side line during matches. It has been a staple match-day accessory for inter-county managers for years but Harte had resisted the fashion and the extra line of dialogue. He made sure to have a wise senior counsel by his side but most of all he trusted his own counsel.
The suggestion is that his son Mark, a former Tyrone player, is his third eye in the stand and that would tally with the management eco-system Harte has always cultivated: tight, small, close, trusted. The modern trend in GAA management is to go large: an orchestra of wind and brass arranged around the conductor. Dublin football has more than 20 people involved, so do the Clare hurlers. Tyrone? A small band of session musicians.
That is how he always played it. During the decade when he managed the Tyrone minors and under-21s the only other member of his management team was
Fr Gerard McAleer. When Harte and McAleer took over the senior team for the 2003 season Paddy Tally was added to the ticket as team trainer. One plus two was his preference.
Within that structure there was a strict hierarchy: Harte picked the team. He invited the input of others but team selection wasn’t arrived at by consensus or by committee. “Mickey would take on board what I was saying,” says Tony Donnelly, part of Harte’s management for 10 years and a close friend for more than 30 years, “but the ultimate team selection was his. He wanted to hear your opinions and you felt part of the process. But the final say, of course, was Mickey’s.”
Harte’s relationship with Paddy Tally broke down on precisely on that point. “I discovered he was he was talking to influential players outside of training sessions about certain team selections,” wrote Harte in his autobiography. “Paddy’s role never prescribed any involvement in picking the team.”
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After two seasons as his trainer, including the breakthrough All-Ireland in 2003, Harte parted company with Tally at the end of 2004. At that point Donnelly came on board. For a couple of years Harte had used him as an unofficial adviser.
On match days he would come down to the wire at half time or meet him by the dressing-room door; before the 2003 All-Ireland final against Armagh he called to his house one Friday and asked him to think like Joe Kernan, the Armagh manager, for the next four days, trying to get behind enemy eyes.
In his quarter-of-a-century of managing Tyrone teams Harte has basically leaned on two confidantes: Donnelly and McAleer. But his inner circle wasn’t reserved exclusively for friends. In 2005 he took a calculated punt on Fergal McCann as the team’s new trainer.
“There were a lot of doubts cast about Fergal at first,” says Philip Jordan, former Tyrone player and multiple All Star. “People didn’t know him that well within the county and there were a few higher profile people within the county that people might have been touting as a trainer. Thankfully, they made the right choice. I’m sure Mickey had his homework done.”
McCann stayed on board for 10 seasons, precisely the same spell as Donnelly. The whole dynamic of the management team depended on a few things, the greatest of which was clarity. Mickey spoke before training and on match days he gave the speeches that reached for the players’ hearts; Donnelly concentrated on tactics and the opposition; McCann conducted training. In the lead-up to a match, when all of those strands needed to be tied, Harte handled that.
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“Mickey always said there are no egos to appease,” says Donnelly. “In terms of demarcation Mickey was the manager but he didn’t want yes-men with him. He wanted people that would challenge his thought processes. Because we went back such a long way there was no, ‘You’re the boss, I’m your understudy’, sort of thing but I wasn’t going to undermine Mickey either. Privately, we would have everything out on the table and challenge each other.”
The loyalty he generated in others was extraordinary. Peter Quinlivan started doing video analysis for Harte when he was manager of Errigal Ciaran in 2002 and is still the Tyrone video analyst now; Michael Moynagh has been kit manager for all of Harte’s time, and before.
Others came and went. Caroline Currid was sports psychologist for the 2008 All-Ireland winning season but just for that year. Harte had been using a guy called Bart McEnroe as a personal sounding board and in 2009 he tried to bring him on board as a mind coach. It didn’t work. “That would be an understatement,” says Jordan. The players made their feelings plain to Harte and McEnroe left the stage.
The challenge for Harte has been to manage the tension between stability and staleness. Since the turn of the decade Tyrone have been a peripheral force in the championship. Nobody in Tyrone openly suggested that Harte should stand down but his latest three-year term concludes this year and for the first time in his 13-year reign he has reached the end of a term without an extension already in place.
Over the last couple of years Harte recognised the need to freshen up his management team. His old centre-back Gavin Devlin came on board: “He would be one of these jovial kind of characters,” says Jordan. “He always loved the crack and messing about but when it came to the training field he was probably the most vocal player. In 2005 he was taken off at half time against Dublin. He was the one player in the dressing room still talking. He never played for the rest of the year but he was still one of the players in training pushing the whole thing on. A very, very good motivator.”
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Devlin can be fiery and animated on the side line; alongside him Harte is generally perched like an owl, only moving his head. “I remember Mickey as a young man managing,” says Donnelly, “and he wouldn’t have had that cool persona he has now.”
In McCann’s place Harte appointed Peter Donnelly as team trainer for this season. He was pivotal to the success of Cavan’s minors and under-21s in recent years and he came with a tall reputation. At the beginning of the year Harte wanted to be more “hands-on” with training; at the beginning of the summer he stood back and gave Donnelly his head. His influence on their summer run is hard to quantify but, locally and quietly, it has been handsomely acknowledged.
And Harte? The assumption was that he was finished. Yesterday’s man. Out of respect nobody put it so bluntly; that judgement just hung around, like an odour. Not now.