Tyrone boss remains upbeat ahead of trip to Orchard County

By Niall Gartland

TYRONE ladies boss Darren McCann insists that they can hold their own in the ultra-competitive world of Division One football as they look ahead to Sunday’s second-round tie against Armagh at St Paul’s, Lurgan.

The Red Hands eagerly-awaited return to the top-flight ended in a 4-4 to 0-2 defeat at the hands of 2021 and 2022 All-Ireland Champions Meath last Sunday, a game played in torrid conditions in Newtownstewart.

It doesn’t get any easier as they travel to the home of the reigning league champions Armagh this Sunday, but there were positives to be gleaned from their defeat to the Royals, including the fact that they prevented their opponents from scoring for a full 25 minutes of the second half.

Tyrone’s new manager McCann’s confidence in his side was by no means diminished by their 14-point defeat, and he thinks it’s by no means infeasible that they manage to avoid relegation when all is said and done.

“We’ve Armagh in Armagh and that’s a big ask but at the end of the day there’s no real pressure on us.

“Everybody outside our group is expecting us to go down. We don’t want that to happen obviously – we want to prove that we’re good enough to belong in Division One football and that we can stay in Division One football.

“We got a good test in our first day out and it’s going to be another. Armagh are probably looking towards winning an All-Ireland at this stage, and they won last year’s Division One title, but we’re hoping to learn from these matches and improve as we go along.”

Last Sunday’s match against Meath was overshadowed by the terrible weather conditions and both teams conducted themselves well in the circumstances.

That said, McCann acknowledged that the vaunted Meath team were full value for their victory while pointing out that by no means was it all doom and gloom from a Tyrone perspective.

Asked if the game should’ve been called off, McCann said: “I suppose when the ball was thrown-in, it wasn’t quite as bad as it ended up.

“It was a disaster of a day, trying to keep the girls warm and both teams ended up using a lot of subs, but ultimately it was Meath who coped with the conditions that bit better.

“It was a great experience for our girls coming up against two-time All-Ireland champions and we’ll learn a lot from it.

“They got two soft goals in each other but apart from that we held them from large stretches.

“We seemed to switch off a couple of times but on the whole Meath did cope better with the conditions on the day.”

The Red Hands trailed by 2-4 to 0-2 at half-time and faced a mountain to climb, but to their credit they stuck to their task well and Meath didn’t land another score until a 55th-minute goal from Megan Collins.

“At half-time we didn’t see the game as over, we’d started to make a few in-roads and had created a good goal chance.

“We spoke about a few things we could improve on – they were a bit hungrier to the breaking ball I thought, but I think we did well in the second half and nullified them for large periods.”