A couple of weeks before the 2003 All-Ireland football final, the Tyrone players a task at the end of a training session.
They were asked to scribble down something positive about every other squad member. The young coach got all the responses typed up. A letter was waiting for each player on their bed the night before they faced Armagh in Croke Park.
The reason was simple. Only three of the squad had experience of an All-Ireland final, having been involved in the 1995 decider against Dublin.
Paddy Tally had been on the fringes of the panel that year, and he was looking for a way to alleviate and ease the nerves of younger players. It worked. The next day, Tyrone claimed Sam Maguire for the first time.
Tyrone’s Father Gerard McAleer, Mickey Harte and Paddy Tally with the Sam Maguire in 2003
Tally was only 29 when Mickey Harte brought him into his backroom team as coach ahead of that breakthrough All-Ireland. His innovations on the training field were widely credited with the county finally reaching the promised land – the ravenous manner that players hunted and crowded Kerry in that infamous 2003 semi-final was down to Tally’s use of small-sided games in his coaching.
However, within 12 months the relationship between manager and coach had soured with Harte hinting that he had overstepped boundaries. ‘I discovered he was talking to influential players outside of training sessions about certain team selections. Paddy’s role never prescribed any involvement in picking the team,’ Harte revealed in his autobiography.
Nonetheless, that success with his native county was only a prologue to what has been one of the most remarkable coaching journeys in modern GAA. This weekend, he will be a crucial part of Andy Moran’s backroom with Mayo being the fourth county that he has helped guide to an All-Ireland final after Tyrone, Down and Kerry.
‘His energy and passion for the game hits you straight away,’ says Kevin McKernan, a key part of the Down team that Tally helped bring out from nowhere to within a point of an unlikely All-Ireland title in 2010.
‘He has such a passion for coaching, such a passion for football. And he has a passion for improving players and bringing the best out of teams. When a coach has that, it’s easy to believe in them. When Paddy tells you a game-plan and lays out in simple terms why it will work, you believe him.’
Kevin McKernan of Down takes on Paul Kerrigan on Cork in the 2010 All-Ireland football final
McKernan first worked with Tally when Ross Carr initially brought into the Down set-up. ‘He was way ahead of his time, testing our hydration levels with urine samples, this was back in 2008. None of us had seen that before.’
When James McCartan took over the Mourne County a couple years later, he kept Tally on board. Within a few months, they had done what Down can do and unexpectedly reached an All-Ireland final – trouncing Jack O’Connor’s Kerry in a seismic quarter-final.
‘I was chatting about that Kerry game the other day. I’m asked about it a lot,’ McKernan said. ‘When we went down to Croke Park that day, every one of us was utterly convinced that we were going to win. And it came from the work we did on the training field, hours spent on how we were going to keep the ball from Declan O’Sullivan and the Gooch.
‘I was number six and Paddy wanted me on O’Sullivan, but as soon as it was clear the ball wasn’t coming to him, he wanted me dropping back to sweep in front of Dan Gordon who was on [Kieran]Donaghy. Not going to lie. It was tight going, having two jobs, but because Paddy had this unique way of making you believe in his game-plan and him and James had shown us how that game-plan was going to work, I knew if I did those jobs well, we would win.
Kerry’s Jack O’Connor shakes hands with Paddy Tally during his time with Derry footballers
‘Kerry were not prepared for how we were set up, how well-drilled we were or convinced in our game-plan. The way that Down played that day probably planted the seed in Jack O’Connor’s mind to bring Paddy down to Kerry.’
Tally embarking on the 600-mile round trip from Galbally, outside Omagh, to Kerry Centre of Excellence in Currans has been well-documented, but it came about after O’Connor had sounded out Tally about working with him in Kildare. When he was given the keys to the Kingdom for a third time, O’Connor was determined to bring the Tyrone man with him.
There were plenty of people who were unconvinced that Kerry needed expertise from Tyrone, but winning is the only currency that matters down there and when Tally made their defence a more organised and structured unit on the way to the 2022 title, those complaints disappeared.
Tally made that long road trip for three years, eventually been given the less demanding role of performance coach to lessen commutes. However, when he was approached to manage Derry in the autumn of 2024, he felt it was too good to turn down.
It was his second spell as an inter-county manager. He had two years in charge of Down that was disrupted by Covid – Tally was one of a handful of managers who were caught organising training sessions in breach of pandemic regulations – and he left even though the county had offered him a one-year extension. But McKernan said that even in that short spell, Tally’s creativity and innovation came to the fore.
‘That Down team at the time were very small by inter-county standards. So, with players five or six inches smaller around the middle, Paddy decided to go with a box kick-out strategy that worked. He’s always creative in how he looks for solutions. And he left Down in a decent place at the time, blooded a lot of young players.’
Tally’s time with Kerry has given him intimate knowledge of how best to trouble the Kingdom
Tally’s background is as PE teacher, he trained at St Mary’s College, Belfast and returned to his alma mater in the 2010s to create a Sigerson-winning team from a base of less than 200 male students, although it did include McKernan, who had gone back as a mature student, and future Tyrone All-Ireland winners in Conor Meyler and Kieran McGeary.
In the 2017 Sigerson final, St Mary’s shocked a star-studded UCD team that had Jack McCaffrey and Paul Mannion among a number of Dublin stars, and they did so by playing a fast-transitioning, counter-attacking style that Tally had honed at The Ranch.
‘Nearly half the Dublin team were on that UCD side,’ remembers Gavin McGilly, Mary’s GAA development officer, who was part of Tally’s backroom team. ‘Nobody gave us much of a prayer.
‘But the players had utter belief in what Paddy was trying to instil. And Paddy is a proven winner. Almost every team he has been involved with as a coach has walked up the steps of the Hogan Stand, or nearly got there,’ McGilly said.
‘He had designed a game-plan which nullified the likes of Mannion and McCaffrey and played to our strengths when we had the ball. And it was all based around hard work. That’s why I am sure he’ll have something up his sleeve for the Cliffords in this game.’
McKernan said that Tally brought the same qualities to Mary’s as he had done with Down. ‘He just wants to get the best out of every team he works with. It is the same with Mayo. It’s funny that they are facing Kerry in the final, given that Paddy was there for three years, but there will be no conflict, he will just want to get the most out of Mayo.’
Both McKernan and McGilly have seen the attributes that Tally brings in the way that Mayo have improved with every game this year.
Andy Moran’s Mayo side are massive underdogs against Kerry but Tally gives them an edge
‘There has been a ferocious work-rate among the Mayo players, especially in the last couple of games and everything that Paddy does is predicated on working hard,’ McGilly said. ‘There are a far different outfit now to the one that was beaten by Roscommon.’
And McGilly feels that the thing that drives Tally is a desire to make footballers better.
‘He is a very creative and innovative coach, but more than that, he is just obsessed with football. He just thinks about it all the time and is driven by players getting the most out of themselves. And Paddy is as happy coaching Galbally Pearses under-12 as he is preparing Mayo for an All-Ireland final. It is just about getting the most out of players,’ says McGilly.
Moran put together an impressive-looking coaching ticket when he got the Mayo job. His old teammates in Colm Boyle and Keith Higgins, his former college mate in Donegal’s Paul Durcan. But his ace may be the coach who was almost made an honorary Kerryman back in 2022 when his work on the training field was credited with bringing Sam back to the Kingdom.
And now as he runs into those same Kerry players in Croke Park, Paddy Tally might be about to complete the most remarkable chapter of an exceptional coaching career.
