A 'manifestation' not to be missed

Cavanman's Diary

Three weeks ago, a high stool, the sun shining and my stories growing taller. I’m in a bar, drinking cheap beer with the Basques when, suddenly, the scene becomes charged.

A worried-looking woman comes rushing through the doors, a pram in tow. The kindly owner, who had been serving us, races out from behind the counter and bolts the doors.

Outside, we can hear a large gathering of people (one man’s crowd is another man’s mob, so I’ll use neither term), marching down the narrow streets of San Sebastian’s old town.

Flares are going off, chants are ringing in the air. I ask the woman with the baby what is going on. “Here, what’s happening?” I enquire, but she speaks no Cavanese.

Also having no English, she whips out her phone and types something into a translation app. “A manifestation!” it read. I am no further on, but thank her anyway.

Luckily, one of our party could converse in the local lingo and she would later ascertain that this was some sort of anti-Fascist demonstration, a big hubbub, studenty types. In hindsight, they made a big racket but it was nothing out of the way, either.

Still, we were tourists in a foreign land. As an aside, maybe I shouldn’t have called it ‘San Sebastian’ at all earlier – the locals refer to the city as Donostia. It’s a sort of Derry/Londonderry type situation. A local row, let’s say – more of which later.

San Sebastian/Donostia is my favourite place. I first went there to check out the local version of handball – pelota a mana – years ago and have returned a few times since. From Dublin, you fly into Bilbao and get an 80-minute bus north to the coastal resort, which boasts the best food in Europe, beautiful beaches, lots of handball alleys… All of the boxes most holidaymakers want ticked, I’m sure.

These demonstrations seemed to be relatively common over there; there was another a couple of days later. As a foreigner, I found it all a bit bizarre, a group materialising from the ether, dressed in the same colours, thundering up a busy street chanting slogans and waving flags only to disappear as quickly as they arrived.

Then again, we do it here, too. What would a Basque think if they landed in Clones this Sunday and tuned into the local frequency? High jinks are guaranteed. There will be drinking on the streets, the burgers will be sizzling on the hot plates and young and not-so-young will lose the run of themselves on the terraces.

And there is a game of ball to be played, of course, and no-one will be spared there. This is the royal rumble in the drumlins and the last one standing will have their hand raised.

Someone will prove a hero; more will be cast as villains. That’s the beauty of the championship high wire act and it’s magnified when it’s the oldest derby in the game.

On this fixture, I can only go back to ’95. That day, Monaghan were favourites in Clones but just couldn’t kick the ball over – or under – the bar.

The king that afternoon was Paul O’Dowd; the ‘Podman’ saved Declan Smyth’s penalty and Cavan won, 1-9 to 0-10, to make the Ulster final.

On the front page of this paper four days later was a photo of Fintan Cahill, the Man of the Match. You may not have seen the picture but you’ll see it now if you close your eyes – Cahill in classic pose, ball under his arm, determination on his face, heading for goal, full-back floundering. That was my indoctrination to Cavan v Monaghan. Others go back a lot further. Damien Donohoe, of this parish, high-tailed it with his father Peter – never known to miss a Cavan match - to the 1988 game, fresh from receiving his first Holy Communion (Damien’s, not Peter’s).

I like to say that Damien was introduced to two sacraments on the same day. Monaghan won that one, 0-16 to 0-14. We’ll move on quickly.

There’s never much in it. Cavan and Monaghan have drawn more often than any other two sides in the history of championship football. In 1958, they played a trilogy, each worse than the last if contemporaneous reports are to be believed.

They drew first day out in Clones in a match the Celt reckoned “must rank high on the list of the worst games of football played under a championship tag”, where “dog rough, useless, mulish play was the order of the day”.

In the Independent, legendary writer John D Hickey commented that “for the most part, the ball was merely of secondary importance. The players had worn themselves out in the orgy of ankle-tapping, elbow-slinging and jersey pulling and the hundred and one tricks which all the too-old, the unfit and the sub-standard footballers know and use when the opponent is getting the better of things”.

Poet and playwright Tom MacIntyre saved two Monaghan penalties to force a replay, which wasn’t much better; the sides drawing 1-5 apiece at Breffni Park on a day when the Tavey brothers, John and Paddy, from Donaghmoyne lined out for opposing sides. Extra time, as was the norm, was not played because the referee had retreated to the dressing room to get away from “a mob, hundreds-strong”.

The third game was fixed for Casement Park on a Sunday evening and this time Cavan clicked, building up a 0-8 to 0-1 half-time lead and eventually winning 0-14 to 1-6.

So, this is a rivalry with 120 years of history behind it and a thousand stories. For me, it’s the best match to cover. There’s a friendly hatred there; one Monaghan supporter I know refers to our stadium as Ibrox.

“If there was any team Cavan would have preferred to beat on their way towards a crack at the Ulster Senior Football Championship title and the Anglo-Celt Cup, it was Monaghan,” wrote Eamonn Gaffney on the front page of this newspaper after that win in ’95. Cavan won again in 2001 – a game mentioned at length in this column not long ago so I’ll spare you another reheated dish – and then the teams didn’t meet till 2013, and again in 2015, and then another dance in 2017. Monaghan won all three, by a combined total of five points.

Cavan sank them in 2019 on a great day in Breffni and then, the most dramatic of the lot, 2020 when the current manager, at the height of lockdown, tested the 5km restrictions in place at the time by kicking the winner from a neighbouring townland.

And now, they go again. Cavan and Monaghan always do – and when they do, that lovely, ambiguous phrase I heard from the nervous Basque lady is guaranteed: A manifestation.

What is it? A display, a sign, an apparition, a coming together – something like that. It’s vague but you know yourself. On Sunday afternoon, the lads will fill in the blanks.