OPINION: Carlow win can be Cavan's 'reset' button

Cavan won against Carlow and that was all that mattered. Their sights must now be calibrated on Derry, writes PAUL FITZPATRICK.

Monday morning and the ears of the nation were glued to RTE radio. The draw took place at 8.30am. By 8.35, the turf accountants had opened their books and Cavan had been installed at a miserly 4/9, with Derry in at an extremely generous 9/4.

Did the bookies know something we didn’t? It was startling to see Derry, coming off the back of a rousing victory over Meath in which they played their best football of the year in the second half, coming to a venue where they already won in the league, installed as large outsiders.

By 11am, though, that 9/4 was long gone. Canny punters had snapped it up. And who could blame them, because the smart money says this is going to be closer than the weather and at least as uncomfortable.

Derry are an enigma. Since 2007, when they beat Mayo and Laois and ran the Dubs to three points in the quarter-finals, they have not grasped the opportunity provided by the qualifiers.

In the intervening years before this one, they have played 13 games in the back door, winning just five.

Cavan’s record is marginally better, winning six of 13, but the difference in how we evaluate it is that the Blues were in transition for much of that period, spending all bar one season from 2008-15 in Division 3. Derry spent it all in the top two divisions and performed creditably in a lot of big Ulster Championship clashes over the period.

In fact, when one takes into account Derry’s relatively high standing in the game, it’s baffling how they have failed to make inroads in qualifiers and have, in fact, lost three times to Longford since 2006, lost to Kildare a couple of times, Cavan and Galway.

Their ranking based on their final league position – where the Division 1 toppers are first, Division 2 toppers ninth, Division 4 proppers 32nd and so on – from Derry’s Spring campaigns from 2008 to last year left them first, second, seventh, 11th, 14th, ninth, second and eighth respectively. That’s not too shabby and averages out around seventh in the land.

Based purely on the odds, then, a win for the Oak Leafers on Saturday afternoon in Cavan would represent a shock. And this summer has shown us that shocks can and do still happen in the modern day football world where teams prepare to professional levels.

For a championship which started heading slowly and inexorably in a straight line, with not an upset on the horizon, there have been plenty of twists and turns since. Take last weekend in Clones.

“Shooting practice as Malachy O’Rourke gets a lovely opportunity to further integrate a talented Under 21 group. No chance the dethroned Ulster champions will be bettered by a team that coughed up 2-21 to Offaly,” read the preview in one national newspaper on Saturday morning.

“That Longford recovered to just about overcome Down, easily the worst team in Ulster, does little to dissuade from the argument of a rout with early goals and a constant stream of points.”

So, Longford were expected to be no-hopers. But it didn’t happen; Longford slayed the Farney dragon in one of the biggest upsets in years. What does that tell us?

More than anything, it underlines again the perils of the dreaded six-day turnaround.

Cavan were in a difficult position going into their qualifier against Carlow. Against a team other than the Division 4 strugglers, they could have been beaten. That they weren’t, that they won by seven points, is a real positive.

We’re not trying to dress up the win over Carlow as anything it wasn’t; Cavan were not convincing, fluent or particularly potent. The fact is, though, that better teams than Cavan have been caught out by having to recover, physically and mentally, from the trauma of losing something they’d spent months building towards in the space of less than a week.

A 2012 study of 27,000 soccer matches in seven countries found that teams who played with just two days to recover against a team afforded three were 40pc less likely to win. In addition, 70pc less goals were scored in the final half hour of those matches than the norm.

And that study only looked at it from a physical point of view in relation to fatigue; factor in the adverse psychological effect of being knocked out of the provincial championship and the effect is amplified, albeit that, in a worse-case Gaelic football scenario, teams have six days rather than three to bounce back.

Only Dublin, who beat Sligo in 2001, had come out again six days after a defeat and won. Many of the relevant results were upsets, many were hammering matches. It’s fair to say, in the final analysis, that it could be worth seven or eight points of a headstart to the team that is well-rested and sufficiently prepared.

Cavan must view the Carlow game, then, as a messy job, the sort of task you’d rather have avoided but know it’s better to have got it over with. Like going to the dentist, say.

Now that’s it’s done, though, it can have the same effect as a ‘reset’ button. Terry Hyland admitted last Saturday that his players were “shell-shocked” by conceding 2-1 in a couple of minutes before half-time in the Tyrone replay. It was a fitting analogy.

Shell shock is a signature injury of war but it can be overcome in time. Cavan still exhibited symptoms against Carlow – they were heavy-legged, a little lethargic, muddled in their thinking at times – but they kept with the fight and got the reward of a place in the next round.

Whether the mental scars of that Tyrone defeat linger, we will know this Saturday afternoon at Kingspan Breffni Park (throw-in, 3.30pm). The feeling is that Cavan’s need is greater.

They must win or the good work from the league and the emphatic victory over Armagh will be remembered with an asterisk attached.