A tough duel but Cavan find a different way to slay that badger

Cavanman's Diary

On the week that Cavan last beat Mayo in the championship, a man from Gowna fought a badger. I’m serious – it even made this newspaper. “Mr John Cullen, Pottle, Gowna, had a rather exciting experience with a badger, which he attacked with a hayfork, the animal retaliating viciously,” the report read.

“After a hard fight for over half an hour, Mr Cullen, fearing the worst, called on his son to bring him a gun, with which he shot the badger.

“Mr Cullen says it was the toughest duel he ever had.”

The newspaper was dated September 25, 1948. Cavan beat Mayo in the All-Ireland final on September 26 – and not again until last Sunday, May 18, 2025.

Now, Cullen v the Badger (what would Don King have called this? Death in the Sett? Full Throttle in Pottle?) prompts some questions, the obvious one being why the bould John waited so long to change his tactical approach.

The badger, perhaps working behind the jab, cutting off the ring, clearly had the upper hand - but why did his, presumably, two-legged foe leave it till he was “fearing the worst” before doing what he surely should have done in the first place?

I like to think that coming from Gowna, maybe he was a football man, which would make sense because, down all the years and all the cursed days, Cavan teams have never made things easy on themselves, either.

A few weeks back in Omagh, for the umpteenth time, they reached a crossroads, saw the sign for Gung Ho and took the other road. Let’s be honest, it was hard to see the way back and the supporters reacted accordingly; a vanishingly small crowd made the trip to MacHale Park.

“That cliché about travelling in hope rather than expectation would have been true had they travelled at all,” wrote Conor McKeon, damningly, in Monday’s Irish Independent.

“The Cavan players loitered in the middle of the pitch and drank in the sun with the few family and supporters who had made it.

“It looked more like a weekend neighbourhood summer soiree than a raucous celebration for a landmark Championship win.”

‘Landmark’ was an apt word, though, because, wherever this team’s journey takes them, this game will be referenced, the day Cavan took a championship scalp really worth taking. Should Cavan go on to do something special, Castlebar will be the day it started. Should they not, Castlebar will be the day it ended. Either way, it’s a day that will be referenced for years to come.

Yes, Mayo were poor but that’s by the by. This was a win against a recognised top team, a win Ray Galligan admitted last week his team were desperately seeking to “change the landscape of how they’re viewed”. They did that; they earned respect.

There was a moment towards the end of the match which summed up Cavan’s approach, when Mayo’s dashing forward, Ryan O’Donoghue, was clattered by a bone-shaking, fair challenge from Killian ‘The Gunner’ Brady. Reeling, the brilliant Belmullet man, who had been haunted by Niall Carolan all day, off-loaded the ball instantly but his thoughts were clearly scrambled. The teammate O’Donoghue thought was there, was not; maybe, it was an apparition of sorts, induced by a heavy hit.

The unfortunate O’Donoghue’s handpass went straight to a Cavanman and they raced up the field and scored. It was unusual to see a pass go so wildly astray at that level of football but then, everything about this match was; it just felt like that kind of day, a day when ghosts were banished.

(Centre-field in ’48, incidentally, was a forebear of Killian’s, Phil ‘The Gunner’, cut, they say, from the same cloth.)

Seventy-seven years is a long time. The people were different back then, closer to the land maybe (a man might, I don’t know, find himself fighting a badger of an evening, for example).

“A kite flying high over the pitch was decked out with the Mayo colours while a rabbit in the same garb was released shortly before the start,” the report on these pages of the ’48 final recorded matter-of-factly, as if this wasn’t the daftest carry-on imaginable.

“After nibbling at the grass, it seemed stage struck and was picked up by a steward. Then out dashed a hare dressed in blue for Cavan. It ran round briskly whilst the crowd cheered. It, too, was picked up and the parade started.”

A crowd of 75,000 attended that game, with a reported 25,000 unable to gain admittance.

“The crowd were so dense - a swaying mass of humanity - that the situation was positively dangerous for old or delicate individuals. Many people fainted...” the report reckoned.

In the Market Square on the Tuesday after the final, the Cavan chairman, Patsy Lynch, spoke to the masses.

"In the victory celebrations tonight, we should not let the opportunity pass without mentioning our traditional friends, the Gaels of Mayo,” he proclaimed.

“At any time that a Cavan team appeared in Mayo, they were accorded a great reception and they counted them among their greatest friends.”

And it’s true, there is an affinity between the counties, moreso than others a similar distance away. Why that is, I don’t know. Maybe the common kinship is built on a latent recognition that well, if you’re in this, get out of it while you can or otherwise, it’s going to hurt.

It’s when you least expect it, though, that both teams can surprise you - and vice versa. Witness Mayo scoring own goals and missing penalties in All-Ireland finals, beating the greatest team of all time and losing next day out; remember Cavan winning the Ulster Championship a month after being relegated to Division 3 – and then going to Division 4 before the ribbons had been cut from the cup. All of this is in the last five years alone.

So, I headed west torn between dangerously unfounded optimism in the heart and a faint sense of dread in the head.

I gave a lift to two young ladies of my acquaintance and on the drive, football wasn’t mentioned, not once – and having covered this same fixture last year and the recent one in Healy Park, I must say I was quite happy about that state of affairs.

We reached Castlebar and my passengers disembarked, laden with camping gear, heading further west still to Achill. I considered joining them and rued that I couldn’t.

To the stadium, a couple of familiar faces outside but not many. “Big ask, now,” muttered one Cavanman who knows his football better than most, better than me, anyway.

Into the lift, up to the press box. “Any chance?” asked one wizened scribe. “I wouldn’t back us,” I admitted, secretly still hoping we would give it a good rattle but too cowardly to say it aloud in front of the grown-ups.

And early on, yes, it was clear there was something different about Cavan – they were up for this one. But bodies started to fall and men looked leggy and when Mayo went in at half-time three points up, without having done anything really of note, you knew, just knew, it was going to be one of those days.

And then, like the man from Pottle, God rest him, Cavan said, to hell with this messing around, sent for the shotgun and blasted all before them. A “rather exciting experience”, indeed.

On the way home, I stopped in O’Connor’s of Tulsk, a shop and pub along the roadside. The sun was setting but there was still a warmth in the air. My phone hadn’t stopped ringing and I found myself giddy. Across the shop counter, the bar was hopping; I heard a man say ‘Some win for Cavan’ and for the second time in a few hours, I thought of abandoning all plans and joining in there, too.

But I had reports to write, more’s the pity, of discarded pitchforks and slain badgers and famous wins and generations of the same family, 77 years apart, in the same colours, fighting the same fight. That’s the beauty of it and that's why, despite it all, we love it. On I went.