Brilliant Derry abused for being Derry

The build-up to this soccer World Cup has been laden with nostalgia pieces showcasing each of the great teams in their pomp. Both BBC and RTÉ have been offering us the chance to reminisce over Zidane's French side, Garrincha's Brazil and the highlights of the Technicolor 1970s.

Some of the work has been of the very highest standard and shows the benefit of being at ease with the cameras. That's one lesson some GAA teams could learn immediately.

The best programme so far was the extended highlights of Argentina against England from the 1986 World Cup. England, it turns out, had no tactics apart from kicking, elbowing and punching Maradona. The other most noticeable aspect of all the pre-1990 games is the leisurely pace and slipshod nature of the defences, the poor physical conditioning and scrawniness of the bodies.

It's a very different and less beautiful game now. The highlights reels all show the marked difference between the eras in terms of talent, application and intensity that comes with intense competition and development. Soccer, although less beautiful, is increasingly more compelling as the standards level out.

Watching the Ulster football championship game between Derry and Tyrone, followed by the Leinster football championship double header, the same overwhelming feeling of watching different eras washed over me. All the Leinster council need to do is insist on retro kits and saturated filters and presto we're back in the '70s. It seems like plenty of people would be quite happy with that too if the outcry after another Battle of Omagh is to be taken seriously.

For some reason the most interesting game of the championship so far has been dismissed as "forgettable" and "disgraceful". It was neither. The All-Ireland champions have been dispatched after a brilliant display of naked aggression from a pretender. Not many sports have this drama in the first round with the promise of weeks more to come.

The point about watching Maradona taking a kicking from England and then destroying them in the second half is not just that Tyrone are capable of recovery (they are), but that the Leinster teams can learn and appropriate in time. Laois and Dublin are in a different class to the four teams who played in Croke Park on the last Sunday in May and so look to be part of the thrusting modernity characterised by Derry in Omagh. If Kildare or Wexford or Offaly or Meath were to progress to the point where they could beat Tyrone it would be heralded as a giant breakthrough. When Derry do it, it's dismissed as tribal warfare unworthy for the eyes of youngsters.

This was the best game of the Championship so far and will be remembered for the quality of calm control that Derry exuded, for the way that Tyrone were exposed as a psychologically fragile team when faced with a mirror image. Derry should listen to the squealing zealots who want to protect football from them and use their words as inspiration to become even better. But it'll be hard to top their brilliance against Tyrone.