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Football

"We all had a look at ourselves" | Brian Dooher on Tyrone's turning point

Fresh from winning the All-Ireland Final, Brian Dooher joined Nathan Murphy to discuss the afterm...



Football

"We all had a look at ourselves" | Brian Dooher on Tyrone's turning point

Fresh from winning the All-Ireland Final, Brian Dooher joined Nathan Murphy to discuss the aftermath of Tyrone's victory.

The last time Tyrone won an All-Ireland final, Brian Dooher was in the middle of everything. He raised Sam Maguire and delivered the speech as captain of the team.

On Saturday, Dooher didn't give a speech or raise Sam Maguire. His captain did while he watched on from the sideline. Two successes 13 years apart have allowed Dooher to join Kevin Heffernan, Tony Hanahoe, Billy Morgan and Paidi O Sé as the only men to have captained and managed their county to Sam Maguire.

"It's a relief to get there. I'm just glad it's over at this stage...It's all down to the bunch of players. The work rate over the last nine months has been phenomenal."

When Dooher praises his players for the last nine months, he's not just relying on an age-old sporting cliché. This Tyrone team came through a variety of challenges both on and off the field, including a loss in their very first game of the year.

"You can't think too far ahead of yourself because that's the biggest downfall you'll have.

It's the old cliché of one game at a time and that's all we wanted to do. We wanted to win our first game and we didn't even do that, Donegal beat us in the national league and we got to the semi-final of the national league but we were well beaten by Kerry as we all know.

But we probably improved most matches, we took everything on board. All credit to our coaches and the performance analysis people."

That loss to Kerry proved to be a seminal moment for this Tyrone side. It was inarguably a hammering on the day, but Dooher, his players and his coaching staff took a lot from it.

"We all had to look at each other to be honest. We had a look at ourselves as management and as players as well.

A lot of people had to look at themselves to see what we could do better and what were we doing. You can say it's a turning point, I don't know. People might think it is, people might think it isn't. Everything is hindsight now. It definitely helped us.

We had a serious amount of work to do to stop shipping goals and thankfully we done that during the championship. We by-and-large addressed that during the championship."

Tyrone conceded one goal in five championship games while scoring six themselves en route to becoming All-Ireland Champions.

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