Joe Brolly describes Tyrone’s win over Monaghan as a ‘defeat for the human spirit’

It was a hard watch

The taste of defeat for Monaghan yesterday can't be much worse than the horrible taste left in most spectators mouths after Saturday's All-Ireland quarter-final in Croke Park. Mickey Harte saw his Tyrone side emerge with an 0-18 to 0-14 win but it was achieved in an incredibly ugly game, especially in the latter stages. Monaghan ended with 13 men while Tyrone also saw Ronan McNamee receive his marching orders leaving Joe Brolly to... you guessed it... lament the game as all that is wrong with Gaelic football. The Derry native takes a wrecking ball to both sides' tactics and displays yesterday in his Sunday Independent column today and referee Marty Duffy doesn't escape either. The article opens with the acidic 'The only thing one can say about Martin Duffy is that he is not as bad as his brother'. Things don't improve from there as Brolly highlights a number of incidences during the game that turned his stomach.

The Invisible Man resumed his vendetta against the Cavanagh brothers but only in the scoring area. It is remarkable how well balanced they are when they are out the field. There, breaking tackles is easy. Inside the opponent's half however, the Croke Park grass becomes an ice rink. The match was everything that was bad about modern football.

Brolly then describes the match as a 'soul destroying 80 minutes' while highlighting negativity from several Tyrone players including his old bete noir:

In the 53rd minute, Sean Cavanagh went to ground after minor contact and lay there for a full two minutes, apparently stricken. Eventually he got slowly to his feet, checked his head again and within ten seconds was sprinting for a ball which he won.

Brolly does concede, however, that the game was almost impossible to referee due to the incidents on both sides and that Marty Duffy was in put in a difficult position.

The diving stalling and mean-spiritedness was overwhelming and systematic. It was a depressing soul-destroying 80-minutes (almost 10 minutes injury time for all the non-injuries) and a defeat for the human spirit. Some of the really good Tyrone lads like Mattie Donnelly, Justin McMahon and Peter Harte must cringe at what's happening to them.

It's not all from bad from Joe today, however, as he is full of praise for Aidan O'Shea and his impressive performance in the win over Donegal. He's even coined a new nickname for the Mayo attacker...

Another benefit of having the Bull of Breaffy on the square was that, for another long ball, he crashed into the keeper Paul Durcan and Neil McGee. McGee stayed on his feet for a second but like a boxer whose body reacts slower than his brain to the knock-down blow, he suddenly staggered and went to ground. He never recovered. Nor did Donegal.

Joe then heaps more praise on Mayo as he declares them and O'Shea as the best things about his Saturday evening watching the fare on offer in Drumcondra:

I like Mayo. I like them a lot. Thank god for them yesterday because there was nothing else. As the race to the bottom continues the conversation in Croke Park was all about whether we'll have a game at all in a decade's time. And about Aidan O'Shea, God bless him.

H/T Sunday Independent