Mickey Harte rejects the notion that Tyrone are firm favourites to defeat Derry in Celtic Park on Sunday week.

The Ulster SFC derby will be the fifth meeting of the teams in 2016, with the Red Hands already having won the previous four. But Tyrone's legendary manager insists those previous results count for nothing:

"Really, the truth of the matter is, apart from the O Fiaich Cup and our league game, it should really be two-all; it shouldn't be four-nil because they had us on the ropes in Owenbeg, they had one hand on the McKenna Cup and didn't hold onto it and we got extra-time," he points out in The Irish News.

"So it's a false sense of this sort of superiority that's there. It's not true. If you really look into the detail of those games… I'm sure they're not looking at this being an impossible task for them. They'll be saying: 'Those two days we ought to have been winners'. And if they should have been winners then, there is no reason they couldn't be winners on another day.

"We all know Ulster is a minefield and always has been. Our Dublin is in Celtic Park next week. That's our Dublin. And we have to treat Derry the very same way we would treat Dublin, Kerry or Cork or any of the top teams in the country and we have to be playing at the top of our game to make sure that we get the result that we want.

"It really doesn't matter what anybody says outside of our camp in terms of how we are going to perform this year. If we're going to react or respond to whether it's good talk about you or bad talk about you, then you won't deliver the best of yourself.

"If we'd listened to all the information that was out there last year, then we would have curled up and gone home and forgot about football. We didn't do that. So if we were to take this on board now that we are suddenly heading to the pinnacle, we'd be foolish."

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