Tyrone’s Brian Dooher hits out at inter-county scheduling

Dooher was speaking after seeing his side squeeze past Cavan in Kingspan Breffni where the teams played around 100 minutes of championship football. And while Cavan are out of action until the All-Ireland series next month, Tyrone go again this Sunday when they play Donegal in Celtic Park this Sunday in an Ulster SFC semi-final.

“I’ve said it all year – the player welfare is not there,” said the Tyrone boss.

“The players are the last thing they consider at this time. What they’re expecting of players who have to get up and do a day’s work tomorrow. And next week it's crazy but that’s the way it is and we’re not ... I’m not the man putting my body on the line out there, it’s those young boys who are giving everything as they have done all year. They need a wee bit of respect in the middle of all this. That’s something that’s sadly lacking at the minute.”

Dooher insisted that the quality of Donegal’s performance in beating Derry means that Jim McGuinness, who was in Cavan for the game, won’t be too worried about what Tyrone showed.

“There’s no words could do it justice, how good they were. It was as good a performance as I have seen. They just dismantled Derry basically who were two in a row Ulster champions, league champions, that’s what they did, and in some style.

“They have phenomenal pace, phenomenal work rate, it was a great match to watch actually. To be fair to Derry, give them credit too, but Donegal’s goals were real exhibition stuff.

“Jim was here – I’m not sure he’ll go away too worried, let’s be honest about it. Our performance today was nowhere near. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that performance is nowhere near what we need for Donegal.

"We go in and Donegal will be big favourites by a country mile. You know what? We’re still there and we’ll go and give a good account of ourselves. Getting bodies recovered will be the big focus.”