Cavan can prosper in huge Ulster clash

Ulster SFC preview

We came across a quote recently from the great American sports writer Wright Thompson, from a brilliant piece he wrote on Manchester United last year.

Thompson, the doyen of the sportswriting game, visited Manchester and spoke to the older generation of supporters. He even attended Mass in a church near Old Trafford, soaking up a sense of the community.

“This tribe has always been supported by two load-bearing spiritual columns: longing for what is lost and hungering for what is to come,” he wrote. Immediately, we thought of the Cavan football supporters; Thompson's description was perfectly apt for them too.

There is a strong measure of exceptionalism about the psyche of Cavan followers, the sense that Cavan are inherently superior. It probably originates from the first half of the last century, when it rang true, but decades of disappointment have seen a degree of fatalism enter the mix, which makes for a heady concoction.

This Saturday, Cavan will travel to Belfast to meet Antrim, a team Cavan supporters have always tended to believe we will beat. The stats paint a clear picture: Antrim have the worst record in the province over the past 70 years, with one Ulster final appearance and no outright victories. Yet Cavan have tended to find them very difficult to get over.

Antrim are not a bogey team, like Tyrone for example, but they probably have a better record against Cavan than any other team in the province.

Prior to Cavan's win in the Ulster quarter-final in 2020 – a sticky game in which Antrim led at half-time and a save from Ray Galligan arguably kept the hosts in the game – Antrim had beaten Cavan in five of their previous six encounters in all competitions.

Forty years ago next month, the Cavan team were booed by their own supporters when Antrim beat them 1-7 to 0-8 in the first round at Breffni Park, the second year in a row the Saffrons had knocked Cavan out. And it wasn't a case that Antrim were particularly strong at the time; they would lose the next round by 14 points to Armagh and, incredibly, wouldn't win another championship match till 2000.

In 2003, they beat Cavan again in the first round; two years later, Cavan beat them in a replay. And then came 2009 and one of the worst defeats of the lot.

That was a funny era for football in the county. Cavan had been chopping and changing managers with regularity in the post Martin McHugh era, with Liam Austin, Val Andrews, Mattie Kerrigan, Martin McElkennon and Donal Keogan all having a stint in the previous 10 years.

The 1997 success was squandered; a golden generation of players did not enjoy the senior success their talent suggested they should and there had been just two Ulster final appearances at minor and U21 level since '96.

By 2009, Tommy Carr was the Cavan manager. He had a reasonably good panel of players but they were under-performing and league form was poor.

At the end of April, Cavan travelled to Headfort to play Galway in a challenge match in pouring rain. Before the game, the team lined up for a photo with Brian O’Reilly, an All-Ireland winner in 1952 who now lived in the Galway village and sadly passed away earlier this year.

It was a lovely touch but the name on everyone’s lips was that of All-Star Dermot McCabe.

McCabe was named at full-forward in the programme but didn’t line out. On the Tuesday, Carr told the Irish Independent that he had had no word from his most decorated player and intimated that McCabe had effectively retired.

McCabe, Man of the Match at 22 in the 1997 Ulster final, had been a thoroughbred for Cavan for 15 years. Putting an icon out to pasture publicly, and against his own wishes it seemed, was a curious ploy for a new manager from outside the county, struggling to win friends or matches – and the two are inextricably linked – in Cavan.

So, the championship build-up was distracted. Carr was under pressure from all angles yet, unexpectedly, the senior team beat Fermanagh by a point in the first round.

A week later, I was in the Belgian town of Hasselt visiting a friend of mine, a Donegal man, who was working there.

Cavan were due to meet the winners of Donegal and Antrim in the Ulster semi-final. The nearest bar showing the match was in Geel, 25 miles away. We caught a train and strolled down from the station, past the mental hospital, from where the patients had a weekly excursion on Sunday afternoons. It was a surreal scene but not as surreal as when Antrim won the match.

Suddenly, having expected to go into the semi-final against Donegal as big underdogs, Cavan only had to beat Ulster’s “whipping boys” to make the Ulster final.

In the preview, I predicted a comfortable win by “four or five points”. The article was cringeworthy. Most Cavan fans, high on the win over Fermanagh, believed that Cavan would steamroll Antrim and this correspondent lazily bought into it.

Then, misery. The sun shone in Clones, Antrim supporters, buzzzing from beating Donegal, travelled in their thousands. In a carnival atmosphere, Cavan wilted, scoring just twice in the second half. Trailing 0-13 to 0-7, they got a late goal from sub David Givney. It was another bleak chapter in the sorrowful mysteries. The Assumption, the Scourging, the Agony in the Beer Garden…

The Ulster final was denied us again. Of course, that Antrim team were simply better than Cavan, a good side built around some excellent club teams under the watch of charismatic manager Liam 'Baker' Bradley, but it didn’t matter. Cavan did not rate Antrim, seemed to take them for granted and flopped in Clones, delivering a dreadfully disappointing performance.

In the first half of the 20th century, Antrim had been formidable opposition but they hadn’t won an Ulster title since they beat Cavan in the final in 1946. And that defeat had cut so deep that the following year, Cavan got together to train for the Ulster final for the first time to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

The 2009 loss sent Cavan into a tailspin and championship results got worse for the following three years until the ship was steadied with a run to the last eight in 2013. From there, Cavan began to ascend the divisions in the league and were competitive in the championship, losing to the eventual Ulster champions in 2013, 2015 and 2016 by one point twice and in a replay (albeit by 10) on the other occasion.

All of that fed into the long-awaited breakthrough in 2020. What made that win so sweet was that it was few saw it coming.

It seemed that Cavan's moment had passed, that the successful graduates of the 2011-2014 U21 sides had missed their chance. The team had endured successive league relegations and two heavy losses at the tail end of the 2019 championship appeared to have exposed once and for all the gulf that existed between Cavan and the elite sides in the province.

Coming from the preliminary round to win that championship was an extraordinary achievement but within a few months, the Blues were hurtling back down to earth with an awful league campaign and a limp defeat against Tyrone in Omagh.

Which brings us to 2022. By any measure, this Saturday's opening round must be seen as a tricky assignment for Cavan.

Antrim are certainly improved; while they blew it in the end, with two games to go in Division 3, they were in pole position for promotion. Their manager, Tyrone All-Ireland winner Enda McGinley, has vast experience of inter-county football and has them going well.

In the opposite corner, it is hard to make a case for Cavan having improved. While they were on a hiding to nothing in Division 4 – no less than a commanding win in every match, which was not realistic, was going to be enough to satisfy supporters, whose expectations have been raised by that thrilling 2020 Ulster triumph – form was stuttering.

Cavan were clearly the best team in the division and proved it by winning it out but it was far from emphatic. In most games, they built up leads and were curiously reluctant to kick on.

Cavan retain essentially the entire panel who won the Anglo-Celt Cup 18 months ago, beating Monaghan, Antrim, Down and Donegal along the way. They are, at this stage, probably the most experienced group the county has assembled in the last 70 years and certainly the most decorated between minor, U21 and senior.

For instance, the eight most experienced players who will definitely start on Saturday have an average of 91 appearances between them, namely Gearoid McKiernan (119 caps), Jason McLoughlin (88), Killian Brady (93), Raymond Galligan (93) and Killian Clarke (95), Padraig Faulkner (84) and Conor Moynagh (67).

This group have played in all four divisions, in four league finals, in All-Ireland quarter and semi-finals and have numerous medals between underage and senior. The same can be said for those who may well come on, including Niall Murray (93 caps) and Martin Reilly (156).

Yet none are over the hill; most are in their late 20s and should be at the peak of their powers.

This Cavan group have been able to compete with some of the best teams in the country on their day but a quirk of theirs is that they do not have a high cruising speed. They tend to play to the level of the opposition and do not generally cope particularly well with the favourites' tag.

The feeling before the league was that this team was at a crossroads. Everything is in place for them to kick on – the age profile is good, there is continuity in management, player retention is no longer an issue and they have developed a couple of scoring forwards at last – but the time is now.

Cavan tick all of the boxes for a team at the peak of their development; championship will tell us if they are or if they peaked 18 months ago and have been on a steep decline since.

The sense is that the squad know it better than anyone. The players opted not to conduct interviews this week, which sets a precedent; never before to our knowledge have the Cavan players declined interviews prior to the first round of the championship. The stated reason was that they wanted to “keep the head down and do their talking on the pitch”.

That suggests they are aware of the importance of making hay now. When players are hovering around or above the 100-cap mark, as a large cohort of the Cavan squad are, it's reasonable to assume that they are on the home stretch of their careers.

At this stage in Cavan's development, then, anything less than an Ulster final appearance will be disappointing and could even signal the start of a break-up of this team, many of whom have soldiered for a decade and given tremendous service.

Mickey Graham has always kept something up his sleeve for championship, both as a club and county manager, and has generally had his teams primed to deliver when the big day comes around. On the pick of Cavan's form in the league, they should have too much for Antrim, especially given there were question marks around the standard in Division 3 this year, with Louth and Limerick – both of whom beat Antrim - contesting the final having only recently escaped the basement.

2009 is a lifetime ago in every sense and Cavan are much better prepared and more talented than back then.

Then again, there were enough dodgy patches in various games to suggest that Cavan are not near the level they were at in 2020, which all makes this one especially hard to predict.

History tells us, though, there will be absolutely nothing easy in the tight confines of Corrigan Park this Saturday. What's certain is that for Cavan, only a victory will do. Should they not achieve it, this will go down as a very disappointing loss.

In a way, despite winning Ulster the year before last and claiming silverware a few weeks ago in Croke Park, Cavan's backs are to the wall again. The good news is that such a scenario is exactly when this current group have shown their quality before and the feeling is that they will rise to the occasion again and set up a tilt at a third Ulster final in four years.

Verdict: Cavan.