Graham: 'Players have embraced Tailteann opportunity'

GAA news

Paul Fitzpatrick at Croke Park

Cavan manager Mickey Graham believes his players have embraced the opportunity provided by the Tailteann Cup and the supporters have got behind it, too.

“It was very hard to get over the disappointment of the Donegal game and sometimes you don’t know how lads are going to react but we gave the lads a few days off, let them back to the clubs for a week and we regrouped, sat down and said ‘why would we let all the good work we have put in so far be undone, let’s give this a good cut and see where it gets us’,” he said at today's semi-final launch in Croke Park.

“It’s a stepping stone to maybe making the last 16 of the qualifiers next season.

“There was a good atmosphere in Kingspan Breffni for the Down game we felt and an even better atmosphere for the Fermanagh game. I think they were only expecting 3,000 and there could have been near 6,000 there for that game.

“There is a good buzz around Cavan at the moment for this weekend so we’ll just see how that pans out. There definitely seems to be good interest in it.

“It’s a great sign within the squad to have the lads buying into what you want to do. We have a great core group of players there, everybody is in it for the right reasons and there is a great culture within the squad. They’re just striving to improve.

“We had a couple of disappointing years in the league there and they want to correct that by putting in performances and we feel that with the number of young players that we have at this point in time, the more games we can get for them, the better.”

Asked why he felt Cavan plummeted from Division 1 to 4 in the league, while simultaneously performing well in the championship, Graham cited mitigating factors.

“A lot of things contributed to that, obviously the short season last year where there were only three group games and it was split into sections. We felt we went in under-cooked into that league, we had only one challenge game under our belt before it started and once you lost that first game against Fermanagh you were always under pressure.

“And that pressure probably told on us a wee bit too, we lost a number of key players during that, Ciaran Brady, James Smith, Thomas Galligan. But look, we had to take it as it is, we dusted ourselves down and said we’d try and correct it this year.

“We definitely would have taken an awful lot of learnings, personally this is my fourth year in the job and I’d like to think that I’ve learned an awful lot in the last year or two.”

The manager first broached the subject of the Tailteann Cup in the dressing-room after the Ulster semi-final loss to Donegal.

“It was straight afterwards, there was disappointment and our heads were probably all over the place at that stage. Lads were disappointed and realised we could have got something out of the game. I said go away and play with the clubs, dust yourselves down and we’ll decide when you come back what way we’re going to approach this.

“After a few days I was talking to numerous players individually on the phone and they all said they wanted to get more games and they felt, as I said, that they had put so much work in to get to where they were that it would be a shame not to try and see it out.

Nobody expressed reservations about it, he said.

“None whatsoever, I didn’t have to have a conversation with anybody and that just shows you the mindset we have in there at the moment, we have the right men in there who want to represent their county and it’s great.

“It’s a great experience for them to come up here. Being around a few schools in Cavan this week, the kids were talking about coming up to Croke Park.

“Being up here and them coming to watch it is inspiring the next generation, they are saying ‘I want to play with Cavan, I want to be in Croke Park’ and that in itself is a success I think, if it’s going to encourage more children to play football in the years ahead.”