'It's key that we can get more scores on the board' - Hyland

Paul Fitzpatrick

Monday evening in the Slieve Russell and Terry Hyland is in jovial mood. The Cavan manager is in the west of the county to fulfil some media duties, with RTE 2FM’s Game On show broadcasting live from the golf club’s annual Pro-Am.

On air, Hyland is joined by Meath great Bernard Flynn, who jokes that Hyland “must be the only inter-county manager not under pressure at the minute”. And if he is, Terry isn’t showing it.

The Lacken clubman generally wears a smile in all his dealings with the fourth estate and when The Anglo-Celt catches up with him later, he’s typically positive.

That’s not to say, though, that this week isn’t a busy one. Preparing for an Ulster semi-final replay is serious business. The drawn game has been diced and sliced in the fans’ post-mortems over the past 10 days and Hyland and his backroom team have, naturally, been undergoing the same process.

Hyland runs a busy hardware store in Ballyhaise but the farmers looking for fertiliser and their wives buying appliances may have found the boss pre-occupied of late.

“The same hours go in for any game, it doesn’t matter if it’s league or championship,” Hyland smiles.

“They’re all of equal importance in a sense because you have to win them all.”
To win this one, Cavan, the common logic says, will need to throw another curveball at Mickey Harte’s men. Then again, there could be one or two coming the other way, too.

“Do I expect Tyrone to set up any different the next day? Probably not. Changes in personnel? Possibly one or two. Tyrone are not going to change because of what we did the last day. They’re going to concentrate on their own game and that’s the way it will be.

“How we play may be different or may not be different but we have to do things better for longer periods.”

Much of the talk surrounded the unusually-low scoring return from star forwards Seanie Johnston and Gearoid McKiernan.

How Cavan bring them into the game will have a big bearing again, you suggest.

“You’ll have to wait and see how that happens on the day! It’s key to us that we try to get a few scores out of them because our scoring rate was very low, 10 scores ain’t going to win many championship matches, although we had eight different scorers.

“We were probably blessed that three of them were goals and that kept us in the game. It’s key that we can get more scores on the board, whether it’s Gearoid or Sean or other players. We just need to be a little bit more accurate with our shooting, we probably had wides in areas we would have expected any of the lads to score from.

“It’s championship and it’s Ulster Championship and you’re always going to get close attention and you just have to learn to get up and get on with it.

“Conditions probably had a major part in it as well. We had 13 wides, they had 14 so I’m sure the same questions are being asked in Tyrone.

“Conditions were difficult and people probably didn’t realise that there was quite a strong swirling breeze out there as well which would have affected the accuracy of both teams.”

Hyland believes that while Cavan played well, they didn’t do so for long enough.
“We played in spells, that was probably the big stand-out from it. We played in three 10-minute spells which isn’t enough to win a championship match.

'That’s something that needs to be extended out to a longer period of time. Yet, they never really got out of sight on us and that was probably the comforting part.”

Tyrone seemed spooked early on when Cavan threw full-back Killian Clarke in at the opposite end. That horse has bolted in terms of the surprise element but Hyland doesn’t rule out running such a radical play again, be it with Clarke or someone else.

“I’m not too sure how many cats I have in the bag! Look, we tried something different. It’s great that the myth arose about the high ball in destroying Tyrone yet we scored two goals from running the ball. It’s about mixing the game up and it gets people thinking and wondering what’s happening and what they have to do to counteract it.

“It gets them to change their focus to what maybe they head on their minds before they started out.”

The mood on the coach home last Sunday week was an unusual one. Cavan weren’t elated and weren’t despondent; more than anything, says the manager, they were just looking forward to doing it all over again.

“In fairness, this bunch of players feel they can go out and on any given day, if they put up a good performance, feel they can compete with anyone at the top level. It’s consistency in games and the length of it, sometimes we do dip a little bit and we get caught and we have to learn to get out of that mode.

“I wouldn’t say there was satisfaction. Would I say disappointed? Well, when you score a goal in injury time, you can’t say you’re overly disappointed. I think maybe, though, they were disappointed in themselves that they didn’t see the opportunity out but they were happy to get another crack of the whip.”

Hyland and his selectors will meet in the Riverfront Hotel in Virginia - as is the custom, not always but often - this evening (Wednesday) to finalise their starting team and fine-tune match-ups and everything else that goes with it.

Over a pot of tea, they’ll hammer it out. The suspicion is that they’ll seek to keep Harte guessing.

“I’m a great believer that if you’re an inter-county footballer, you should be able to play anywhere to a point. As in, if a corner-back comes up the field and gets into a shooting position, I’d encourage him to have a shot.

“We’ve discussed it and talked about it. One of the great conundrums we have is how to mix it up and change it around. We have so many players who can play in different positions on the pitch and are similar in ways.

We look at the form for the last couple of weeks, we see how they’re going and we’ll give them their shot at the title.”

Preparations complete, the manager’s arrives on Sunday.