New year, new faces as Graham aims for season opener

GAA news

It may be a new year but in the managerial game, the challenges are familiar. Two days out from the season opener against Armagh (Thursday, 7.45pm, Kingspan Breffni) in the McKenna Cup, Cavan boss Mickey Graham has a number of plates spinning in the air.

For one thing, he has lot a few players to Covid of late; he also has seven or eight new players on the panel whom he hopes to give a run to over the next week. And at the same time, one eye will be on the National League opener against Leitrim at the end of the month.

So far, though, so good, he says.

“The lads have been applying themselves well and putting in a lot of hard work. Obviously after the long club season, there are a few lads with knocks and injuries that you’re trying to get cleared up and you’d be hoping in the next week or two that most of them would be cleared up bar one or two long-term injuries,” Graham told the Anglo-Celt yesterday (Tuesday).

“Hopefully now we don’t pick up any more little niggles along the way.”

His aim for the McKenna Cup is just to get some competitive games, nothing more.

“To be honest with you, just getting match fitness, getting minutes into the legs. We have only been back a few weeks, we played a bit of a game among ourselves and one challenge match [against Roscommon) so it’s just about trying to get minutes and match fitness into the lads because we would have felt last year going into the National League, our first game against Fermanagh, that we were very flat that day.

“We had no games under our belt and it took us four or five gfames before we started to find our feet. It’s about getting game time into as many lads as possible in the next two games and we’ll see what happens after that.”

Is confidence low in the Cavan camp following a very disappointing 2021?

“If the National League had started when it should have last year, I think it would have been a different scenario because we were still on a high. The long break between the Ulster campaign and the All-Ireland semi-final till the league started back kind of broke our momentum and we lost a wee bit of that confidence in between.

“But the lads have come back, they know themselves we didn’t perform as well as could have done last year and we’re looking to rectify that. But there are going to be no easy games, it’s winter football and it levels the playing field, down in Division 4, you have to grind out results, roll up the sleeves and work your socks off.

“Especially in the early games because a lot of teams going into the early part of the league won’t know where they’re at.”

Graham freshened up his backroom team in the off-season, adding clubmate Sean Johnston as forwards coach and Tyrone’s Ryan McMenamin, also in a coaching role.

“Seanie and Ryan bring lots of experience, Seanie has been one of the top forwards in Cavan for many years and we’ll be hoping that he can offer something to our forward line and make us more creative and bring a wee bit of knowledge to that.

“And the same with Ryan, they don’t come much more experienced than Ryan McMenamin – All-Irelands, All-Stars, has managed at inter-county level. They are just two new, fresh voices and the response from the lads so far to both of them has been excellent.

!I’m hoping they’ll bring a wee bit of enthusiasm to the lads and maybe something new that we haven’t been doing before.”

Among the new faces Graham has drafted in are Ryan O'Neill (Kildallan), Cian Madden (Gowna), Jack McKenna, Paul Smith (both Laragh), goalkeeper Lorcan Hammond (Kill) and Ballinagh duo Evan Finnegan and Thomas Smith.

“One or two of them have knocks but any of them that are available, we’ll be hoping to get a bit of game time into them and expose them to that level but we have to just take it day by day at the minute with the Covid situation.

“We have lost a few players to it already and we’re hoping that doesn’t continue but we are taking every day as it comes.

“I’m sure every team is in the same boat, even workplaces at the moment, it just seems like everybody is losing bodies.”