Unified Errigal go where no Tyrone club has ventured

Errigal Ciarán go where no Tyrone club has gone before this weekend.

The All-Ireland club championship throws up many curiosities and this might be the most curious of all.

How have Tyrone, the most consistently successful Ulster county since colour televisions came along, made such a minimal impression at the business end of the club championship?

In 1993, Errigal Ciarán became the first Tyrone team to win the Ulster club title and, bizarrely, they remain the only one to have done so.

By extreme contrast, Tyrone's northern neighbours and bitter rivals Derry, considerably less successful in the county grade over the last four decades, is home to four All-Ireland club champions and a whopping eight different Ulster club title winners.

The highly democratic nature of the Tyrone SFC, with no back-to-back winner since Carrickmore in 2004-05 and nine different champions in the meantime, has often been advanced as a factor.

"I think it's that thing where it's difficult to get much provincial experience built up under a team's belt because the champions tend to change each year," Errigal Ciaran manager Enda McGinley told RTÉ Sport ahead of training earlier this week.

"That definitely is part of the picture. And then you're obviously coming through a particularly tough province, where there's been really, really strong teams over the years as well. Multiple different clubs (from Ulster) winning All-Ireland club titles.

"That means you're coming out of one shark-infested water and into another shark-infested water. It's a long way to survive to get to the All-Ireland series.

"Maybe it's just one of those statistical oddities. I would be very confident in the years to come that the stats will change around that."

This is certainly