Tyrone legend Peter Canavan has denied the accusation that the county with which he made his name now relies on cynical tactics to see out games.
Tipperary U21 manager Tommy Toomey claimed that his side “went out to play the game in the right vein,” whereas Tyrone players “went out to play their way,” after the Premier County were beaten in Saturday’s All-Ireland final.
But Canavan pays no credence to those claims, telling SportsJOE that he was left disappointed by those accusations because “from a Tyrone point of view, those players have not been coached in a cynical manner as was the accusation that was leveled against them.
“Any of the players that are in that panel would back that up. They’re a football team and they’ve been trained and coached to go out and play football.”
Canavan did concede that there was some gamesmanship at the end of the game in terms of how Tyrone saw out the result but insisted that that’s a part of all games.
“Possibly there were some cynical aspects to the game,” he added. “It happened in the last three or four minutes, in my opinion, when we had a team hanging on by their fingernails, trying to win an All-Ireland title.
“(They were) things that would happen in the closing stages of any game so, to be blunt about it, yes I was very disappointed and that comes from someone from a county that have been on the receiving end of All-Ireland final defeats in controversial circumstances.”
With talk that Tyrone U21 boss Feargal Logan was denied access to the Tipperary dressing room after the game, such was he anger of the Tipp camp, Canavan revealed that he had seen scenarios like that take place in the past.
“From time to time it may happen whereby a manager thought that he couldn’t control some of his players or if his players were particularly aggrieved about something then, in order to prevent a situation, that may happen and I have seen it happen.
“But as far as I was aware, most of the Tipperary players shook hands with the Tyrone boys and just got on with it.”
