Tyrone welcomed Darragh Canavan back against Kildare on Saturday night, but another leading scorer for the Red Hands won’t feature against Derry
As one of Tyrone’s top forwards made an earlier-than-expected comeback from injury, Malachy O’Rourke has lost another.
Darragh Canavan wasn’t expected to feature in Saturday night’s opener against Kildare, but was sprung from the bench out of necessity as the home side battled to claim a share of the spoils with the Lilywhites in Omagh.
However, Darren McCurry is set to miss the next few weeks with a calf injury meaning that it will be quite some time before O’Rourke has his full arsenal of attacking weapons with Ruairi Canavan also unavailable at present with a hamstring injury.
“Darren (McCurry) had a foot injury, now it is a calf so he’s out for another few weeks,” stated O’Rourke.
“He was training early on, as all the boys were, but he’s not going to be ready for another few weeks.
“It was great as that was Darragh’s first minutes this year and he hadn’t done much training. Eoin (McElholm the same and a couple of boys are obviously still out – Ruairi (Canavan) and Niall (Devlin) and there’s a lot of boys coming back.”
O’Rourke expressed his disappointment at Tyrone’s failure to open their Division Two campaign with a win despite playing the final quarter of the game with an extra man after Kildare midfielder Brendan Gibbons picked up a second booking.
I suppose the second half was positive in that we were very disappointed with our first half performance. We struggled to win ball around the middle of the field, in the air and on the ground, particularly from the air kickout,” said the Tyrone boss.
“We dropped a lot of stuff short, we missed chances and we had to up the thing in the second half and we did against the wind.
“We were much better in the second half, but then we got ourselves into a really good position and would have liked to hold on. They’d a chance towards the end as well so we’ll take the point, but there’s a lot of aspects of the performance that I wouldn’t be overly happy with.”
Next up for O’Rourke’s men is a round two trip to Celtic Park in a game that has taken on added significance following last weekend’s results.
Ciaran Meenagh’s side were fancied to turn over Meath in Croke Park on Saturday night, but suffered a 0-19 to 1-13 loss meaning the Sperrin rivals meet this Saturday evening with both chasing their first League win.
“No, it’s not (easy), especially as Derry lost as well,” added O’Rourke.
“They have a very strong team out there, maybe 13 of the lads who would have been on their team a couple of years ago. They have a very experienced team out there, so it’s going to be a hard battle, but that’s the way it’s going to be.
“We have new fellas coming on, we’re trying to blood them, we’re trying to see at this level of football whether there’s some of the older, more experienced lads coming back gradually.
“It’s another challenge for us and that’s what we’ll be preparing ourselves for. We hadn’t the urgency, we’d have liked the intensity around the field.
“I thought it was much better in the second half, but you can’t afford to have a half like that. “That’s one thing we’ll be looking to improve for next week.
“The boys have been training hard, they’ve been working well and we wanted to put in a big performance. The second half, as I say, was better than the first, but not good enough overall.”
