‘We know there’s a lot of room for improvement’ - Graham
Damien Donohoe
After Sunday’s win over Carlow, Cavan now sit on top of the Allianz League Division 4 table.
In addition to their five point home victory, their top position is also due to their promotion rivals Sligo and London losing out to Tipperary and Wexford respectively.
Cavan still found lots of lessons to take from the game, manager Mickey Graham told The Anglo-Celt after the contest: “I think we started off the second half pretty well and we got a kind of a dominant spell and probably didn’t make it count as much as we wanted to.”
He recalled how a weakened Carlow had succumbed to a rampant Sligo earlier in the campaign and noted: “They were missing a lot of top players that day and they’ve a lot of them back, and they made it difficult for us today to be honest”.
Finding the positives from Sunday’s match Graham explained: “There were games before when the game starts to get away from you and it keeps unravelling, but the boys found a way and they showed a bit of composure to get the right men on the ball near the end to get those couple of scores just to close it out.”
Cavan converted 11 points against the wind with only one wide in the first half. Despite a good start to the wind assisted second half they didn’t kill off Carlow when the chance arose.
“The wind never won you anything, and we did dominate their kick-out at the start of the second half. We had a lot of pressure and a lot of ball, but we would be disappointed with a couple of aspects,” he conceded.
Tidy up
Graham added: “I thought we gave the ball away cheaply, kicked a lot of ball away when we needed more composure, but look it’s another two points on the board. We know there’s a lot of room for improvement and we’d be hoping to tidy a lot of things up between now and next week against Sligo down in Markievicz Park”.
With seven minutes remaining Thomas Galligan was shown a red card for his part in an off the ball incident.
“No I didn’t see the incident,” said the Cavan manager speaking soon after the final whistle, “so we’ll have to look back on it. I just thought the two of them came together, that was my first impression. I don’t know and I haven’t been talking to Thomas but I’ll have a look at it when I get the video.”
Asked about Jason McLoughlin and Killian Clarke availability, Graham said they were left out as a precautionary measure.
“We were thinking of further down the line so we wanted to get them fully recovered because they’re two key players for us,” he assured.
Cavan are sitting top of the table and looking to Sunday afternoon's challenge in Sligo.
“Yeah look it’s a big game next week.
“Sligo will be disappointed after the result [against Tipperary] last night. It’s a huge game now and whoever gets a result there will be set up nicely going into the last three league games”.