Tyrone GAA football manager Mickey Harte has claimed his team is victimized by live television coverage after a weakened Tyrone team were beaten at home by Mayo in the NFL on Sunday by a score of 1-12 to 1-11.

And Tyrone may even ban the TV cameras from their home game according to their boss after their second defeat in a row.

Harte was forced to start the big game without Conor Gormley, Martin Penrose and Justin McMahon after they picked up retrospective red cards from a previous NFL game.

The suspensions were handed down based on video evidence from their opening game against Derry and Harte insists their absence had a major impact on Sunday.

“The fact is that had our game not been televised live last week we would have had Conor Gormley, Martin Penrose and Justin McMahon on our team,” claimed Harte.

“To do it fairly, every game in the League needs to be video-taped. If you do it with every game then that’s fine. I’m happy to live with that.

“But at the moment that doesn’t seem to be the case so therefore you’re disadvantaged if your games are on live TV.

“A blackout is something we’ll have to consider. In fact, our county board have made suggestions that if that’s going to be case then we could reserve the right to decide whether our league games are to be televised or not.

“I don’t know how many times we’ve been on TV, but the bottom line is if our game against Derry had not been televised we would have Martin Penrose, Conor Gormley and Justin McMahon playing against Mayo.

“That’s an undisputed fact. We were disadvantaged being on live TV. Two of them weren’t red cards. Martin Penrose was a different incident anyway. That’s not condoning what any of them did. We just need it to be on a level playing field.”

Mayo boss John O’Mahony didn’t get involved in the TV controversy after his side made it two wins from two games in the league and tried to play down the significance of the result.

“I don’t know whether it was the pitch or not, but we didn’t seem to have that bit of a bite to get in on that breaking ball, which was disappointing,” moaned O’Mahony.

“But league matches away from home are about winning if you can. We have a lot of things to brush up on if we can. Something we targeted at the beginning, before the League, was four points from the first two games. Sometimes you target them and you don’t get them.”