Tyrone camogs ready to rock again

TYRONE get their All-Ireland Premier Junior Championship campaign underway away to Louth this Saturday afternoon, and manager Paul O’Grady is more than happy with his side’s preparations for their forthcoming campaign.

While other teams across the county may have had league finals and provincial campaigns to contend with in recent weeks, the Red Hand camogs haven’t played a single competitive match since earning themselves a hard-fought victory over Kildare in their fifth and final Division 3A match on the final weekend of March in Brocagh.

Mayo native O’Grady, now in his second season in charge of Tyrone senior camogs, isn’t concerned that they’re coming in cold to this year’s Championship. Quite the contrary – he says the eight-week break has actually helped rather than hindered them.

“We took a bit of a break after the league, which is what we probably intended on anyways.

“With teams pulling out before the start of the league, there were no league semi-finals, and there was no provincial final at our level either, but we played a couple of challenge matches and really focused on our own in-house games, in terms of getting things right for the championship.

“So I think we actually benefitted from having a bit of a break rather than the other way around – we played well in our last challenge game so I’m hapy to see how we’re progressing.”

Tyrone thumped their opponents Louth in their corresponding league clash on a scoreline of 5-18 to 0-1, but that game was an outlier in that sense. The Red Hands had a much tougher schedule than last year, though they still finished a respectable fourth out of sixth in the table and O’Grady hopes the experience of playing high-level opposition will stand to them in the championship with big matches to come following what should be, in theory, a straightforward enough outing against the Wee County on Saturday.

O’Grady said: “There’s a different feel to things this year, last year a few of our matches were basically a walkover. It wasn’t that we weren’t playing well, we were, but it was a bit easier and we found that we weren’t at the same standard of a few of the teams when it came to the championship.

“Last year was our first season and we were just trying to narrow things down to our best 20 players whereas in 2025 we’ve wanted to use our full panel and get our players plenty of game-time.

“ My hope is that we’ll be a lot stronger when t comes to the championship as we have more experience of playing teams at that higher level, so we’re really looking forward to it.

“Hopefully Saturday’s game against Louth will get us going again and then we have a massive game against Wicklow two weeks down the line, they’ve been very impressive this year.”