McCabe glad to be home as Arva bounce back

JFC final preview

It’s good to be back. For three years, Arva’s Jonny McCabe worked on the building sites in Sydney and, at the weekends, travelled out to play for the Michael Cusacks club in Ingleburn, outside the city, under the scorching sun.

It was a great time but home was calling all the same. Checking in with his family and Arva clubmates and following the results, he knew the team were struggling. The pandemic intervened and kept him away longer than intended but when he returned last January, it was straight to training.

“I enjoyed it, I played with Michael Cusacks in Sydney and there were a lot of Cavan links there,” McCabe explained when the Celt visited Michael Cully Park last week.

“We struggled for a couple of years here but we had so many injuries and lads away… That cleared up, we have Ciaran back from a cruciate now, we have Tristan back with us this year and we have kept Peter and James Morris, Conal Sheridan and Danny Ellis fit so I suppose I came home in the right year.

“But I was always keeping an eye on it, I would have been home earlier too only Covid kept me away, it was harder to get home and different things.”

Cusacks was a home away from home. The chairman is a Cavanman and so were many of the players, including former county men like Dara McVeety and James McEnroe.

“I was in construction like most of the lads who go out there. There’s so much work for young Irish lads going out there.

“Stephen Tormey from Knockbride is the chairman of Michael Cusacks – funny enough I was talking to him after we beat Knockbride – and the football is a big help for getting work.

“It’s a good enough standard, there’s a lot of good players. Obviously you don’t train as much and it’s not taken just as seriously but any day you went out, you were up against good opposition, you never got anything easy. A lot of inter-county footballers go over there and play as well.

“It was good to keep ticking over, it was a help when I came home in January. Having played a bit, it did take me a bit of time to get back up but not as long as if I had taken three years out altogether.”

The last time Arva were in a county final was in 2016, when they beat Killinkere in a replay in the intermediate decider. McCabe was captain then, too, and the success was the culmination of a glorious four years during which a young and hungry team went from junior to senior. It seemed as if they would rule the football world together but football doesn’t always work out like that.

A fiendishly difficult draw and some bad luck saw them demoted in their first year at senior and various factors contributed to a general slide since, a slide which has only been arrested this year, with excellent runs in league and championship.

“We were in four finals [from 2013 to 2016], we won two and lost two and we got ourselves up to senior. We thought we’d be able to compete a bit better than we did, we got relegated straight away which was a real disappointment.

“I think that year they relegated three senior teams. I look now and there’s only one going down… but anyway, it doesn’t matter now, there’s no point [talking about it]. You are where you are because you deserve to be there. We are back now and we’ve started again. We are obviously a bit older now, the likes of myself and Ciaran and Peter and James and Conal that were there when we won a couple but we have to go again.

“It's a big game for us now, we had a good enough league campaign and we got ourselves back to Division 1. We want to see now if we can test ourselves against the bigger senior clubs and it’s another step. But we know obviously that there will be nothing easy against Drumlane.”

McCabe was 19 when he played in his first junior final. He’s now 28. It’s different, in every sense.

“When we won the junior in 2014 and the intermediate in 2016, we were just playing football and enjoying it. Now you’re a bit older and we have a couple of younger lads who have come on to the team this year, you’re trying to be a leader for them, like we had when we came on to the team.

“Are we battle-hardened? Knockbride are a good side and we drew with them. Then against Drumlane the first day, if you look at the result you might think it was an easy win but there was nothing easy there. We pulled away a bit at the end but that was a proper tough game. The same against Knockbride and Shannon Gaels put us to the pin of our collar as well.

“I think we are in a good position coming in to play Drumlane. They are probably the same too, we beat them that first day and they had a championship final basically against Knockbride to stay in the competition and they kicked on then.

“They put on a big score against Mountnugent in the quarter-final and then they came out the right side against Drumalee. Hopefully it will be a good game of football and hopefully we can come out on the right side of it.”

A return to the winner’s enclosure and a third championship in 10 seasons would provide balm for the sores of the last couple of seasons.

“It would be huge. We struggled there for a couple of years, I’m not the best man to talk about it because I was away but I know from being in touch with the lads that it was bad there for a couple of years. I don’t know how many games we won in those years between league and championship.

“For the area and for the supporters it would be great, it really would.”