Posts Tagged ‘Tyrone’
Dublin’s 2-14 to 0-12 win over Louth at Croke Park last Saturday set up a mouth watering quarter final clash with Ulster champions Tyrone this weekend. Goals in the first half from full-forward Eoghan O’Gara put Dublin well on their way to victory and helped to ease the disappointment of losing to Leinster rivals Meath.
Paddy Power is offering an interesting Money-Back Special on the Dub’s double goalscorer. If Eoghan O’Gara scores a goal against Tyrone, Paddy Power will refund all losing first, last, anytime goalscorer, double result and winning margin bets on this match*.
* Terms & Conditions apply
Having assessed the chances of the two main contenders for this year’s All Ireland Football championship, who between them account for half the book, our next step is to examine the chasing pack in order to assess where the value might lie amongst the pretenders to the throne. Tyrone at 9/2, Dublin at 10/1, Mayo at 12/1 and Galway at 14/1 are the four counties considered to be within striking distance of the Munster front runners, with 28/1 on offer bar the first six, so today we’ll look at each of these and their chances for success.
It’s a brave man who would assert with any confidence how Tyrone are likely to perform in this year’s championship after what was a very poor league campaign. One win over Cork, largely due to a couple of scrappy goals, and a late hammer blow to deny the Kingdom, were the only bright spots in a very disappointing campaign for Mickey Harte’s men. The early defeats to Derry, Monaghan and Mayo were largely disregarded as the team played with an experimental line up, but by the end of the league there was a lot on the line for the Red Hand men and the manner in which Dublin dismantled them in those circumstances will have been very worrying.
Nobody could argue that Ulster football is fiercely competitive, but the opening five rounds of the National Football League have illustrated that this season, the northern counties appear to be struggling to keep pace with the best teams in the country. The province is performing really well in division two and somewhat hit and miss in division three, but in division one the stark reality was brought home this week when Ladbrokes released odds on which counties would get relegated and the three Ulster counties headed the market.
Tyrone, Derry and Monaghan have recorded four wins out of fifteen games between them – but when games against each other are stripped away, they have won one out of nine games against southern opposition – and that was Tyrone’s somewhat fortuitous win over Cork in Omagh, a game which could easily have been closed out by the Rebels had they defended their goals a little better.
March mayhem continues today and tomorrow with another full round of national league games taking place in both codes. Competitive hurling fixtures are few and far between this week, with the meeting of Cork and Waterford likely to be the only high profile fixture where a straightforward win for the favourites isn’t widely anticipated. There will probably be a few nervous Wexford supporters in advance of their trip to Dr Cullen Park, but for competitive bets this weekend, it’s definitely the big ball code that has a lot more to offer us.
As longstanding followers of Off the Ground will tell you, this column believes that the Cork footballers of 2009 are the real deal. Our recommendation on them to win the All Ireland is on the record, albeit at more or less the same price that they currently trade, and there is considerable confidence that they will not fold on Sunday, as Cork teams have done previously in Croke Park.
Of course when your next match is against the best team of the decade, it’s far from certain that “not folding” will be enough for Cork to advance to an All Ireland final. In fact it won’t be enough at all, and Conor Counihan and his players will know this all too well.
Readers of this column could be forgiven for simply backing the draw in every game mentioned on this blog, such has been the plethora of level matches in recent recommendations. Armagh vs Monaghan, Wexford vs Roscommon, Dublin vs Kildare minor, Offaly vs Dublin minor….
Another game where a draw is quite possible but we’ll plough on nonetheless, is the Connacht Final this Sunday between the Old Firm of Galway and Mayo. The game takes place in Pearse Stadium, which confers a considerable degree of advantage on Galway. For years Galway and Mayo, not unlike Tipperary and Cork in the Munster hurling, was a rivalry where home advantage tended to play a much bigger part than should have been the case for two border counties. With so many of the great names of Mayo football having attended St. Jarlath’s college in Tuam, it made little or no sense that Mayo hit the rocks in Tuam Stadium time and time again, but yet the ground was widely feared by those of a green and red hue as their hopes and dreams were crushed repeatedly in the historic ground.
Last weekend was very much a case of the All Ireland champions from 2008 in both codes headlining the bill on Saturday and Sunday respectively, and while we have yet to reach the stage of do or die championship action, backers of either Kilkenny or Tyrone to retain their titles must have been happy with what they saw in Tullamore and Belfast respectively.
There is a school of thought that suggests that first Tipperary and now Galway have offered some insight into how to unsettle Kilkenny; that of course being to leave no hurl unbroken in an attempt to physically dominate them, however Off the Ground remains slightly unconvinced by this philosophy. Of course championship hurling remains an intense physical battle and no team ever succeeded by stepping back from confrontation, however the clamour to laud Galway and Tipperary overlooks two key aspects.
We’re all told that stereotyping is a negative trait to be avoided at all costs, yet sometimes it’s just too hard to avoid. Ulster football is just one of those situations. Honestly, if two red headed Irish lads landed into Piccadilly Circus in London wearing green clothes and drunk on whiskey and started beating each other up with shillelaghs while singing about the Famine, it wouldn’t be any more of a ridiculous parody of a famous stereotype than what went on in Celtic Park last Sunday – except that what we saw on TV was no parody, but simply Ulster football at it’s grim and gruesome best.
2009 may yet turn out to be a year of surprises or a year of the same old guard, but we can be very sure after last Sunday that if any county does manage to topple a big gun this summer, they’ll have to do it the hard way. Tyrone, Kerry, Armagh and Dublin have been the leading lights in the football championship for the past decade and right now all four appear to be in very good health, some would say surprisingly so for the time of year.
