THIS YEAR’S OFFALY senior football championship has been a much-maligned competition, with all eight teams qualifying for quarter-finals regardless of their performances in the group stages. As one supporter was heard to remark after a particularly lifeless encounter, “there’s about as much edge in those games as there is on the football they shoveled around the place”. 

There was no such grumbling heard on Sunday afternoon for the last set of group fixtures. 

It wasn’t that the football got the heart racing – county champions Tullamore edged out Rhode by 0-8 to 0-5 in Daingean while Niall McNamee watched on with the aid of crutches, and in Tullamore, leading contenders Ferbane and Edenderry played out a 1-8 to 2-5 draw, where Cian Farrell’s stunning goal for the Reds was out of kilter with the desperately poor shooting that both sets of forwards delivered over the course of the hour. 

None of that mattered, because Mickey Harte was in town. Just over a week ago, rumours were flying around the county about which 2024 panellists weren’t going to make themselves available for selection. Now there will be a clamour for inclusion, as everyone wants to be part of the setup that will be overseen by the joint ticket of current senior manager Declan Kelly, and the man who guided Tyrone to three of their four All-Ireland senior titles.  

And even though the action might have been uninspiring, Harte was upbeat, happy to embrace the public energy that was impossible to ignore as he watched the contest in Daingean. 

“Expectation is a good thing. I would rather have expectation on your shoulders than no hope. And if you haven’t got expectation, you’re kind of a no-hoper, and I don’t believe in that,” he said at a media briefing for local reporters, citing better days for the county that he, Kelly and county board chairman Michael Duignan all committed to bringing back. 

“It’s refreshing, it’s a different scene, different people. I enjoyed the Offaly victories back in the 70s and 80s, I was at those games and you always associated Offaly with a serious edge. There was a drive in them, a competitive edge, something about them that you’d have to be on your game to beat them. That’s good, maybe we could hope to harness that again and put some more stuff to it.

“You’re looking at the level that the team plays at right at the minute, and you figure out can they be better than that? And I think we know from looking at them that they could.”

Though the extra distance from Tyrone might be appealing as well, as he quipped that “It probably is better to be away from your own neighbours, some of them don’t take it too well if you manage their team!”

For many years, it’s been said in Offaly that public expectations have been out of kilter with the side’s humble underage track record since the turn of the millennium. 

But when a team packed with All-Ireland U20 medalists from three years ago fell to a double digit home defeat to London in this year’s Tailteann Cup, there could be no denying that something was askew at senior level. Offaly’s disdain for second-chance structures has been legendary down the years, but Harte’s answer to the idea that the Tailteann Cup should be the first building block was defiant, almost in keeping with Offaly’s longstanding mindset.  

“Would it not be right, if you top Division Three, you might be playing in the All-Ireland series? That’s the first place I’d look,” he said.

In what will be his 35th consecutive year of involvement at county level, Harte made it clear that making this happen won’t be an easy journey for the players, regardless of their enthusiasm levels. 

“It’s about creating a growth culture,” he said. 

“It’s okay to talk about a winning culture but you don’t know if you can win or not, you know that you can create growth and I think that’s what it’s all about. Bring a growth culture to the set up and people will see that this is what it’s about, step-by-step improvements and the demands that that will place on each and everyone involved. Hopefully they will see that this is worth it and it’s worth putting in this effort.

“What we’re looking at is people who are out to give the best version of themselves. We have to let them understand what it takes to do that. It’s a kind of an unwritten contract that people have, if you want to be better and you want to make things better – and they do – then this is the price you pay, so to speak.

“And if you’re prepared to pay that price and pay it in full, then there can be good outcomes from that. And the good outcomes will be growth, progress, better people, better footballers, better representatives for the county and their clubs, that’s what we want, that sense of ‘I’m doing something better, and I’m working at it’. Not to say that what you were doing wasn’t good, but why not stretch yourself? We want everybody to stretch themselves as much as they can to create something better.”