Highs of Graham's tenure will be recalled fondly

Opinion

In the end, it caught us all on the hop including, sources have said, the county board themselves. All of the indications were that Mickey Graham would be remaining in situ.

He had another year left on his agreed term and while the championship was very disappointing, the team had been promoted back to Division 2 of the league. The word on the ground was that he would stay on; just last Tuesday, he attended the official opening of the new sensory room at Kingspan Breffni, wearing his Cavan gear and mingling with players, supporters and dignitaries.

The leading players on the county panel wanted Graham to remain but it is understood that some clubs had expressed reservations and the issue of the management was to be discussed at Monday night’s county board meeting. The manager got wind of this and it seems it helped make up his mind.

The news broke an hour before the meeting, the county board releasing a statement confirming that “after serious considerations”, the Cavan Gaels man had decided to step down.

Graham took over at the tail end of 2018, at a time when Mullinalaghta, whom he was managing, had just won their third Longford SFC in succession and were closing in on a Leinster title, something they eventually managed and which was instantly and universally hailed as one of the great modern-day achievements in Gaelic football.

Graham and his players were the talk of the country; they even ended up on the Late Late Show.

When he came in as manager, Cavan were in Division 1. That first league campaign was difficult, with a win over Roscommon the only real highlight, but Graham was always renowned as a championship manager, a man who, in his own words, “held a bit back” for the dry sod, and so it proved.

Cavan hadn’t beaten a Division 1 team in the championship since 2005 and were rank outsiders against Monaghan, whom they stunned with an outstanding performance. In the Ulster semi-final, they beat Armagh in a replay, running up a tally of 0-23. Cavan were back in an Ulster final; depressingly, it was the first time the county had won an Ulster semi-final since 2001.

The occasion, though, passed them by and, subsequently pitted against Tyrone in the qualifiers, they were well beaten. The manner of those two defeats seemed to convince a fair proportion of the panel that it wasn’t worth hanging round and they didn’t. Up to 10 of the match-day squad for the 2019 Ulster final quit in that off-season.

Graham kept his counsel and got on with it. After a very poor opening-round loss in Armagh in 2020, Cavan strung together three wins in succession to go top of the table. A careless home defeat to Clare followed - and then reports began to emerge of a curious virus in some far-off land and before we knew it, everything had changed.

After six months, Cavan returned with half a squad and two narrow losses saw them relegated again. A week later, they found themselves seven down at half-time in the Ulster Championship against Monaghan and that seemed to be that.

But Graham is a survivor and he’s a winner. As a player, he won stacks of medals; as a manager, he had tasted victory at most levels. He had amassed so much experience, served his time on highways and by-ways in various club and county roles, that he wasn’t going to slip into a blind panic.

Cavan turned that one around for one of the most famous derby wins of them all.

Antrim were dealt with unimpressively but without fuss. Then came Down; trailing by 10 points at one stage, Cavan again refused to be beaten.

What followed was the zenith of Graham’s career. It should not be forgotten that Donegal were 1/14 to win that Ulster title, the shortest odds in the history of the famous final bar 2009. Declan Bonner’s men were being widely mentioned as the only possible challengers to Dublin. Graham had his team primed, though, and they detonated in spectacular fashion, playing Donegal off the pitch.

There were excuses there if they wanted them, and Cavan teams in the past would have gratefully accepted a moral victory but this time, they rose above it all and just got it done.

Graham has always been an emotional character and he showed it that evening in the Athletic Grounds. A couple of minutes into a post-match television interview, voice cracking, he raised his palm. “I can’t,” he said, choking up and walking away.

Given the context, given the fact that they beat two Division 1 teams, that they came from the preliminary round, that Cavan for a generation had tended to have a hangdog look about them and routinely melted when the heat was turned up, it may have been the greatest of the county’s 40 Ulster titles.

Had Graham left at that point, he would have been hailed as one of the county’s greatest managers. The three subsequent seasons, though, saw a decline in performances and results.

2021 was forgiveable in that it was a five-game season (one of which was won and three of which were narrowly lost) and Cavan lost to the All-Ireland champions in waiting in the first round of Ulster. But the defeat to Wicklow, and the ensuing unprecedented drop to Division 4, was a serious blemish on the record of all involved.

In 2022, Cavan won Division 4 and Graham was again seen at his best in the run-in to championship. Antrim had latched on to a relatively small issue – a Cavan delegate, on a whim, had objected to Corrigan Park at a meeting and got backing around the table - and turned it into a cause célèbre.

Graham, always canny, saw his opportunity and turned it into an advantage. Cavan, under siege, played with renewed venom and slaughtered Antrim. In the Ulster semi-final, they played some great football against Donegal but ultimately came up short, undone by, yes, bad luck but also bad defending.

The Tailteann Cup was uncharted territory. Cavan coasted through the early rounds but flopped in the final, after which Graham sounded like a man ready to walk, talking about the privilege it had been to play for and manage the team. After several weeks, he decided to remain and the board handed him a two-year extension.

This year, knowing the importance of it in the new structure, Graham targeted the league, which is not how he has traditionally done business. Cavan won it going away with a bit of style in Croke Park and seemed set for a big championship but it was a disaster. The performance against Armagh was insipid; the Down game was marginally better in that Cavan were still in the game well into the second half but it was still dreadfully disappointing.

The manager is ultimately accountable for that. Just as Graham deserved the plaudits that came his way in 2019 and 2020 and with the various clubs he has led to championship glory, so too does the criticism come back on him when teams under-perform. That’s the nature of the beast; given the time and effort and the millions of euro (and that’s not an exaggeration) that goes into it over numerous seasons, results are everything.

When he took charge, Graham sat down with Malachy Clerkin of the Irish Times for an interview. The stand-out quote was this: “I firmly believe things will get worse before they get better, unfortunately.”

As it turned out, things quickly got a lot better before getting a bit worse. Things went stale for some reason and perhaps he was too loyal to some players. If he had his time over, he might do certain things differently but he has always been his own man.

His legacy will be reaching an Ulster final and then winning one, something very few Cavan managers have achieved in the last 50 years. Players, no matter where he goes, speak glowingly of him. From a media point of view, he has been a complete gentleman.

In 2010, when he was over the Cavan minor footballers, I sat down for an interview with him in the Farnham Arms. One of the questions I asked him was would he like to manage the Cavan senior team in the future.

“That’s my ambition,” he replied.

“I know I’m not quite ready for it yet. I’m still young, I still have a bit to learn. I suppose I’ll probably manage a club team for the next year or two, maybe three or four… I’m still looking for experience and the best place to learn is maybe with adults.

“Maybe three, four, five years down the line, I’d be interested in looking at taking over Cavan… Who know what the future holds but to get a chance to manage Cavan would be a big hope of mine, definitely.”

Ittook him eight years but he got there eventually and, regardless of the revisionism around the 2020 Ulster Championship, his Cavan team did, too.

And for those highs, he will always be fondly remembered by the supporters.