The most deflating thing? We didn’t really have a go

Analysis

Cavan got their selection wrong and the performance itself was very poor, writes Damien Donohoe...

Saturday evening in Castlebar was one to forget for supporters but for the players and the management, it’s one to learn from and remember. As bad as we as supporters felt after the game, it will come nowhere near how annoyed and frustrated the players and management will be feeling.

The group have put in a lot of time since the Tyrone game in preparation for Mayo and the All-Ireland series. They’ve played challenge matches and had a two-day training camp to make sure they were ready, but something went very wrong on Saturday night. It was neither the performance nor the result that they had planned for.

It would be dishonest of me to give false praise after what can only described as a hammering. So what went wrong so badly that saw us drop from a level that was competitive against Tyrone, who beat Mayo in round four of the league, and a level that beat Monaghan, who lost by two points to Mayo a few short weeks ago?

The question was immediately asked after the game, are we just not good enough? I think on reflection we can rule that out. Mayo are unlikely to win the All-Ireland this year but they are in a bracket above us and, based on recent seasons, are joined by the aforementioned Monaghan and Tyrone and we were a match for both those sides in our last two games.

We were also down a few key players with Paddy Lynch, Dara McVeety and Killian Clarke injured. It’s worth considering a Mayo perspective which was put to me on the Mayo Football Podcast last Friday - “if you take Lynch, McVeety, McKiernan and the Galligans (Thomas and Ray) out of Cavan we should be fit to beat what’s left”. So Mayo held no fear of Cavan and will hold no fear after Saturday night should they meet again.

The team selection is the biggest talking point for Cavan supporters - or, specifically, the late changes to the team. I can understand the idea of putting out a dummy team and one in particular that looked very different with just two personnel changes last minute but when it didn’t work, it looked really bad.

When Lynch got injured, the question was who was going to make up the 7.5 points total per game he averaged over the league and championship. When the team was named on Friday, the three out-and-out forwards (Brady, O’Reilly and O’Reilly) named in the full-forward line looked to be a sensible decision. When word came through that two defenders in Jason McLoughlin and Conor Rehill were going to start ahead of Cormac and Caoimhin O’Reilly, it changed the perception of how we were going to play.

Manager Raymond Galligan said in his post-match interview that the changes were “absolutely not” to play more defensively or to shore up the defence. I believe him that it may not have been the management’s intention but the first thing that came into supporters’ minds when they saw the changes was that this was a defensive move and I think it’s fair to assume it would have entered the players’ minds as well.

With Lynch out, Gerard Smith is our second highest-scoring forward this season over the league and championship with 2-2 to his name and he is followed by Oisin Brady who has 0-7. Both players started when Lynch was fit so you’re not replacing Lynch’s usual contribution by including them.

Neither McLoughlin nor Conor Rehill have played a lot of minutes this year and between them they have scored two points, with Rehill hitting one against Cork and another against Meath. They can hardly be described as a scoring option but I can’t imagine they were included for that reason.

James Smith was pushed forward to form a two-man full-forward line and I’m sure the hope was that he would add to the scoring, which he did with a goal, but he had already been adding to our scoring tally with 1-5 between league and championship before Saturday. Invariably when we attacked, James was winning the ball outside the scoring zone and didn’t have runners coming to meet him to bring the ball to the scoring zone at pace.

While the Lynch change was forced, the question must be asked: why was Cian Madden dropped? After missing the first two league games, he has scored 1-7 in the seven games up to Saturday -despite not playing the full 70 minutes in them all - which makes him Cavan’s second top scorer this year.

Galligan, after the match said: “Going on form, if you’re training well and performing well over the last couple of weeks, you’ll get your opportunity, and that’s how we handled it today.”  We have no idea how players are playing in training so we must assume it was a dip in form.

Given all that information, I still don’t know where we were going to get enough scores to cross the 18 or 19-point mark needed to beat Mayo going on what they had been averaging so far this year. Using a ‘Moneyball’ style analysis merely as an exercise to tease this out, if you add up the total scores so far this year in league and championship that the starting Cavan players against Mayo have hit, it adds up to 44 points in total over nine games.

Cian Madden would have brought that total up 10 points, Caoimhin O’Reilly brings it up six and Cormac O’Reilly brings it up four points. The aim of the game is to score more than your opponent and we didn’t have enough scorers on the field to do that in my opinion.

That said, the players who were on the pitch have to take responsibility for the performance as well. Mayo had 25 shots and took 20 of them (80%) while we had 23 attempts and only scored nine, which is a very poor 39% conversion rate. In fact, it’s not even a good number of chances created so there is work to do in creating and finishing chances.

Mayo did really well on their own kick-outs, winning all bar one of them, and given that we were five points down after 14 minutes, you would think we would have aggressively gone after their kick-out to try to get a foothold in the game. We neither pressed fully or stepped off fully which meant Mayo always seemed to have an outlet and a lot of the time it was in the middle third of the field, leading to a kick pass and a shot. I would love to see Cavan try to go after an opposition kick-out the way we see other county teams do or the way Gowna did last year in the Senior Championship.

We didn’t play the game at a tempo that worried Mayo or really asked them tough questions and that’s the biggest regret. The Cavan supporters would have taken a nine-point defeat a whole lot better if we had created loads of chances or got to a scoring total above 15 because they could then say they had a go and came up short. Instead, it’s deflation.

This group of players are much better than they showed on Saturday evening but they will have to start to step up the intensity and the quality in training if they are going to prove they belong in the All-Ireland series. There is a lot of pride in the group and I’d imagine there will be a good bit of soul-searching done before Dublin come to town.