Niall Morgan has spoken of his frustration at the sniping surrounding the Tyrone team, particularly when they are enduring a poor run of results.
The long-serving goalkeeper was speaking on GPA’s Players’ Voice podcast and noted the change in tone towards players last year as Tyrone put up a poor defence of the Ulster and All-Ireland titles that they won in 2021.
Morgan noted that it resurfaced this year already after they slumped to defeat to Derry in last month’s McKenna Cup final.
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He said: “You look back to last year and we're out early and you're meeting people and the first thing they say is, 'What happened you this year? What's going on up there? I hear such and such had a fight in training and I hear this and that'.
“You're just thinking, 'That couldn't be any further from the truth'.
“Even this year we started ok and then once Derry beat us in the McKenna Cup final it was, 'Everything looks disjointed, it looks like boys aren't getting on and boys don't care'.
“Like, I sort of talked to the boys about it at the weekend, nobody on any county team goes and trains three, four nights a week and shows up for a game at the weekend because they don't care, or because they don't want to be there, do you know what I mean?
“I think right from when I was on the Tyrone panel, I always felt it was important that we stood up for ourselves and weren't afraid to get our point across if we needed.”
It was with that in mind that he became a GPA rep and now sits on the players’ body’s national executive committee.
“Whenever Mattie [Donnelly] took over as captain in 2018, he asked me to be the players' rep. I don't know whether he asked me to be the players' rep because he thought I was a good influence or because he felt I wasn't afraid to say what I thought!
“That involved taking on the GPA role, as just a rep. It's something I enjoyed and helping boys to progress their careers. My big thing was trying to get boys away from the notion that the GPA was only there to help you if you were in a bad place.”
Now in his 11th year on the Tyrone panel, Morgan said that coming off Twitter was a help in terms of shutting out the noise that surrounds players and dealing with the levels of expectation.
“You would have had your good days where people were heaping the praise on you and you would have had the other days where you had a poor game or you had done something maybe you shouldn't have done and you get the other side of it.
“I just found I was, for a while, getting, as the saying goes, too high with the highs and also too low with the lows. I just thought it was best to remove myself from that environment.
“I didn't find it was helping me in any way I suppose. So I just took myself out of the way of it.
“Over the years, yeah, it is hard playing for Tyrone because everybody expects you to win within Tyrone and it's great in a way that they have the belief in you that you have the ability to go and win games, and win trophies and stuff, but at other times it's hard.
“I always say, like, sometimes before a game you can sense whether things are going to go right just by the mood in the camp, how things are going in training and sometimes it's hard because you're going into a game and you're thinking, 'This just isn't going to happen today', or again, something could have happened to somebody that only the players or team know about, that outsiders don't know about.
“And you're thinking, 'I just hope for his sake that this goes well and that it doesn't affect his performance'.
“So it can be tough, managing the expectation and on the flip side it was a big lesson I had to learn to take things as they come and not get carried away with the victory or a defeat.”
After following up an opening day League defeat to Roscommon with a comfortable home win over Donegal, Tyrone go to Tuam to face Galway in round three on Sunday.
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