New manager, new season - anything is possible

Opinion

First Storm Arva, then Storm Isha. If Cavan senior team manager Raymond Galligan aimed to keep things under the radar ahead of the National League throw-in, well, external events managed to do just that for him.

Galligan sat down for a few interviews at the outset of his tenure but, for the most part, he has, if not shunned the limelight, then certainly avoided it and that’s understandable.

Eyebrows were raised when he went for, and got, the job. It was a bold move to essentially swap playing with and captaining the team for managing them, just like that, and he has been keen to knuckle down with as few distractions as possible.

To that end, it has worked out well. Arva’s achievement in becoming the first Cavan men’s side of any hue to win an All-Ireland final in Croke Park in over 50 years, beating a fancied Kerry team in the process, rightly hogged the headlines in the first ‘down weekend’ between the end of Cavan’s involvement in the McKenna Cup and the start of the real stuff.

The second weekend saw a nationwide storm and the staging of the All-Ireland club finals. It will only be the middle of this week, as you read this, when the collective football hive mind turns to the league again.

Arva have given the whole county a boost. The context is important; Cavan sides, club and county, have been in a spirit-crushing rut in recent seasons, repeatedly finding a way to lose matches they should have been winning.

Arva did the opposite and the hope is that it will show the way to other sides in blue and white.

Now, with the big throw-in approaching, put yourselves into Galligan’s shoes. How do you feel? There must be excitement; there must, too, be trepidation.

The manner of his accession to the top job in Cavan sport is nigh on unprecedented nationally. His courage must be applauded; by far the easier option would have been to retire and soak up the well-earned plaudits that would bring, sit tight and go for the bainisteoir bib in a few years’ time, maybe after taking on a club role or something along those lines.

That he went about it the way he did spoke to a high degree of personal ambition, matched by a firmly-held belief in himself and the players at his disposal. It brings with it, though, considerable pressure.

Galligan will know that, by effectively jumping the queue, he may eschew the usual honeymoon period afforded to those who take on the role. Here is a ready-made manager, goes the logic – where is the ready-made team, will come the question.

There is no time to learn on the job, no real margin for error, starting with Saturday afternoon, off-Broadway in Dr Cullen Park.

When the fixtures were being formulated, it was believed that Cavan would open their league campaign in Croker as part of a glamorous double-header but, as it turned out, with St Conleth’s Park undergoing a long-awaited renovation, Cavan and Kildare will meet in Carlow, 30 miles south of Newbridge and light years away from Jones’ Road.

The first challenge: Cavan are well used to travelling for the opening round of the league – this will be the 21st away trip this century, albeit it’s technically not a home game for Cavan’s opponents – and their record in those fixtures is deplorable. Since losing to Saturday’s opponents in 2003, Cavan have played in all four divisions yet have won their opening round league match just five times, including the last two years when they beat Leitrim and Westmeath away, setting themselves up for promotion on both occasions.

Increasing the pressure is the fact that the league has never been so important, which is a jolt to the system of the average football supporter, accustomed to the traditional rhythms of the calendar. Where once, the league was for blowing out the dirty petrol, as Páidí Ó Sé used to say, now the engine must be purring from the off. Championship status depends on it – and that’s where managers are ultimately judged.

The size of the travelling support will give us an insight into how the fan base view the project. To give them their due, Cavan followers, whom I’ve long believed would be worthy subjects for an anthropological study, are quite discerning - they see things, usually, as either poor or very poor or terrible. Until, that is, they don’t, when a few wins spark a sort of mania.

The sense is that they will travel in numbers this Saturday. There is a novelty factor attached to a team when they have a new manager – how will he want them to play? Who will he want to play? – and that should attract the casual fans as well as the ubiquitous diehards.

Cavan, as a county and team, are in an interesting place in their history.

The followers traditionally had a reputation as the most loyal in the country but that has been chipped away at to some degree.

Like coastal erosion, it has been imperceptibly slow but it’s clearly visible when viewed in the historical context. Maybe the identity of the county has been diluted to some extent; maybe penetration by other sports has eaten into the football core supporter base.

Whatever the cause, it means that Cavan are probably akin to many other counties with storied histories who now find themselves seeking to make a breakthrough – the tribe needs a cause to rally around before they will mobilise. That’s, perhaps, a nice way of saying that the bandwagon is always ready to be hitched.

A couple of big wins and, as Van the Man sang, the caravan is on its way!

Galligan, having worked under six Cavan senior managers since making his debut in the Tommy Murphy Cup in 2006, will know as well as anyone that it is no easy job.

Expectations are high and rarely realistic. Cavan folk have inherited the game like a family heirloom, one they’re happy to wear for show when it suits them. Its value, at times, though has appeared merely sentimental.

Even in this era of scientific preparation, however, that sentiment, can be an extremely powerful force. We saw that in 2020, when Galligan, as captain, and Mickey Graham, as manager, welled up in their post-match interviews after the Ulster final.

It brought to mind Tom MacIntyre’s magisterial colour piece on these pages after the 1997 Ulster final. “It’s hard to keep back the tears. Why keep them back? Let them flow.”

Reared in the football heartland of the county, Galligan knows the scene intimately and he has already identified the potency of that connection between team and supporters and the importance of harnessing it.

He spoke, in his first interview, of making this “one big collective approach”.

“I feel the more people that come on board with us and drives this forward, the more successful it can be,” he said.

How successful will it be? The championship draw is difficult and the league will likely revolve, as it always does, around a few key matches. The first of those arrives on Saturday. The task for Galligan is simply to win matches – should his team manage that, he will win over the supporters. It’s a straightforward equation.

When he re-invented himself as a goalkeeper, he trained on his own, with his own coach, most nights that Cavan weren’t meeting up. Within five years, he was an Ulster-winning captain and an All-Star.

It seemed impossible – it always does. He did it anyway. Will the next chapter require a similar alchemy? No doubt.

By Saturday night, we’ll know a lot more but the beauty of it is that for now, anything is possible. We wish them all the very best.