It doesn’t seem that long ago when Kyle Coney was the great red and white hope.
Five points from play in the All-Ireland minor final win over Mayo wasn’t against the grain for the teenager who had the Red Hand in the palm of his lámh from well before final day.
Ardboe knew they had a good thing from when Coney was only a youngster and he ripped it up all year long for that Tyrone minor team playing as an inside forward, taller, faster and bigger than his opponents.
That year was ten years ago, eleven going by the modern GAA calendar.
Peter Harte and Mattie Donnelly were Coney’s teammates that famous September Sunday, the same day the county’s seniors beat Kerry to win Sam, but when the giddy Tyrone posse descended on Jones’ Road with ambitions of dominating for years, it wasn’t Donnelly or Harte who was first in mind to graduate.
So where did it all go for Kyle Coney?
Well, as is often the case with the hottest minors in the country, the AFL came calling and Coney didn’t refuse. He headed off to Australia, destination Sydney Swans only a few weeks after that minor triumph but Tyrone supporters were soon to be dealt the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket.
Coney, despite impressing Down Under came home for Christmas that year he never went back.
The expectations were getting out of hand now with the returning 18-year-old supposed to slot into the senior ranks with the speed and explosiveness they’d known him for.
But senior football is a different ball game to minor and the loss of that option to horse men out of it whenever he wanted softened his sting.
The pressure with being billed the second coming weighed on his shoulders and the gradual pairing away of his confidence combined with his own admission that he didn’t put in the work off the field to come through saw him fall away.
It all reached tipping point in 2015 when, after years of injuries, false comings and disappointments, he was taken off in a McKenna Cup game and decided to walk away.
Two and a bit years on, McKenna Cup time again and Coney is waiving his talents again. Though a man of the match performance in a meaningless McKenna Cup game against Derry in December doesn’t turn huge dials, it is a start and it does represent a chance for Kyle Coney to finally make the mark he threatened to make all those years ago.
His return to the panel has come through hard work and maybe that hard work will take him to where he was meant to go from the very start.
Kyle Coney is awarded his man of the match presentation pic.twitter.com/FfJBNeCaxi
— Tyrone GAA (@TyroneGAALive) December 20, 2018
Tyrone supporters are certainly having it.
Good to see Kyle Coney back out for Tyrone. The best footballers should always be in the squad and on the pitch. Runners and athletes do a job. Footballers make things happen.
— Daniel Kelly (@DanielKelly100) December 20, 2018
https://twitter.com/davidlongtyrone/status/1075881501600956416
McCurry and Kyle Coney back for Tyrone is massive for them, two ballers.
— Paudie Donohoe (@PaudieDonohoe) December 20, 2018
On a night when Peter Canavan’s son Darragh is being met with the same kind of expectations as Coney met ten years ago, the Ardboe 28-year-old’s story might just offer a word of warning to Canavan.
