Times they are -changing for former Breffni kingpins

Paul Fitzpatrick


Around Cornafean, where they’re reared on tales of the mighty men of a few generations ago who won 20 senior titles in Cavan football’s heyday, success hasn’t been the most intimate friend of late.

The game changed, grew fiercer, and teams found themselves treading water and, at times, straining to stay afloat. The high tide mark was set in sepia-tinted days and in a bright new technicolour world, the Reds sometimes floundered and gasped for air.

In his excellent history Up The Reds, George Cartwright spoke of the sense of “hopelessness” in the club at its low-point in the 1970s.

They lost their senior status in 1974 and by 1978, could barely scrape together 15 for a Junior Championship match against Belturbet. In a feature in the Sunday Independent seven years ago, journalist Dermot Crowe related the following anecdote.

“One of the club’s legends, Paudge Masterson, said in an interview that players would laugh off a 20-point defeat whereas in his day Cornafean men would cry their way off the field after a one-point reversal against Cavan Slashers.”

That was rock bottom but there were peaks and troughs in between. In 2000, a late smash and grab saw then-defender and current chairman Eamonn Gaffney hit the net and help the club win the junior title against the odds, stunning Drumgoon.

It could have yielded a glorious decade; it didn’t. That was, in hindsight, a defiant last stand from an aging team who had competed strongly at intermediate level in the 1990s.

Those men (or most of them - the Sheridan cousins and Rory Geoghegan were just kids and kept on keeping on) had paid back the club’s investment with interest and cashed in while the going was good.

That was the boom; the bust followed. The Reds fell away again and 16 long, lean and hungry years passed since that victory.

To win on Sunday meant everything; to do it in such style, with a swagger, caught the eye. The realisation dawns that Sunday’s victory may be the most important win in half a century for the famous Cornafean club.

The players knew it, too. They are a band of brothers (there are five sets in all, including triplets) and played like it. When a ball broke, there was a feeding frenzy as Cornafean players threw their bodies on the line to win it.

And, up front, they had class in abundance, as the final scoreline proved. The ball stuck like glue to Adrian McCaffrey and, alongside him, Barry Doyle sprinkled some magic dust on proceedings from the first bell to the last.

Liam Duignan, wearing 14, was everywhere and the Wharton brothers and the impish James Cullen, raiding up the wing, covered each blade of grass.

So, while the weight of history has hung heavily on Cornafean for the longest time, the manner of this win suggests that this group of talented young players have been emancipated; they have made their own way to this point and, especially given their age and the claustrophic feel in the various rooms of Cavan football, they will believe that they can climb the stairs again.

Captain Dan Wharton, his knee heavily bandaged, spoke in the breathless aftermath, the ‘Olés’ and ‘Campiones’ lustily reverberating in the background.
What did it mean? The world, he said.

“I’ve thought about this for the last year, for the last 16 years the club has been looking towards winning a championship. It’s unbelievable, I can’t put into words what it means to bring the cup back out to Cornafean,” said Dan, hoarse from the battlefield.

“It’s a club with a great tradition and we’ve put in a great effort in the last couple of years and I can’t describe what it means to be bringing the cup back home tonight.

“We put losing last year down to the fact that we didn’t perform on the day, well by Jesus we performed today. Every ball stuck. Lads were hopping off the walls off the dressing-room before the game, we couldn’t wait to get out on the field. This was going to be our year, we weren’t going to leave it behind us.

“Our manager gave us belief, he always tells us we’re good enough and he stuck with us. There was hunger and determination in every lad in that dressing-room.

“We’ll party hard tonight and we’ll be back for the Ulster Club in a couple of weeks!”

Cornafean in Ulster. Imagine that. They’ve earned the right now – nothing comes easy on the big day.

In that Sunday Independent piece, Sean Masterson, a veteran of the 1956 SFC-winning team, mentioned a Junior Championship win back in the mists of time.

“They won a Junior Championship in Cornafean way back and the presentation of medals was up in the hall,” he said. “And they got a crate of stout and went away over and lay down on hay and they drank the stout and they didn’t go near the presentation. It didn’t mean a thing.”

The rules of engagement have changed, though, and the club have embraced the new reality. They’re building from the basement and aiming for the stars.
They tell us that 80 or 90 kids are training in Cornafean on Saturday mornings of late and, since Sunday, these fresh-faced stars of the future have their own heroes to emulate.

The trophy cabinet no longer resemebles an exhibit from a museum, either. The Sean Leddy Cup, garlanded in red, gleamed like a light on the counter of MacSeain’s Bar on Sunday night last. There was stout taken there, too, but the toast was to the class of 2016, not 1956.

A glorious history is well and good but, suddenly, for Cornafean, the past is no longer closing in – rather, the future is opening up for a young and committed group.

Football has a way of throwing up neat tie-ins and, six decades to the month, this was Cornafean’s most significant success since that most recent senior triumph

And, in time, a new history will be written. Up the Reds, indeed.