A dollop of 'Cavan-ness' makes all the difference

Colour view

Kevin Egan at MacHale Park

In one of the most emotive and joyous post-match interviews you’re likely to see, Offaly minor football manager Roger Ryan hailed his side’s “Offaly-ness” live on TG4, after his young charges came through what was effectively their fifth knock-out battle in a row on Monday night in Newbridge.

Despite shipping heavy beatings to Dublin and their final opponents Louth earlier in the championship, the midlanders bounced back with four one-score wins and one extra-time victory, culminating in Monday’s 2-20 to 3-14 rollercoaster, where they trailed by four points with 10 minutes to play.

One day prior, on Sunday in Castlebar, Cavan took on a Mayo side that seemed utterly bereft of “Mayo-ness”.

Whatever doubts there might be about Mayo in tight finishes, whatever longstanding issues there might be about their ability to produce ruthless scoring forwards, not even Jim Gavin’s Dublin at the peak of their powers were able to put Mayo in vice-grip or to prevent them from going through spells of sheer chaotic, rampant brilliance that overwhelms opponents, even if just temporarily.

This Mayo team is not on a par with the Mayo side of Andy Moran, Lee Keegan, Keith Higgins and the rest, but they still have the same identity in their DNA, they still tend to have plenty of fire in the belly, they’re still not as good at manifesting ice in the veins.

And for all the diminution in the level of star quality, they nonetheless contested a Division 1 league final this year and they continue to field difference-makers that are capable of producing big moments that can set a contest on fire.

Aidan O’Shea’s towering catch at the very end for the goal, albeit a score that came far too late to influence the result, was evidence of that.

Yet at no stage in the contest did any of those moments come to pass. A county that is famed for their ability to thrive in mayhem instead tried their hand at controlled, measured football, for reasons best known only to Kevin McStay and the Gods.

Cavan gratefully accepted the offer of engaging on terms that were much more favourable to them and duly thrived as they learned that when it came to match-ups and method, they were able to go toe-to-toe with their fancied opponents.

And if those facets of the game were a push, the winning of it was going to come down to the ability to deny at one end, and to create at the other, good scoring chances. On those scorecards, there was unanimity from the judges, 10-8 across the board in favour of the Breffni interlopers.

The crowd over just over 7,000 supporters was bemoaned by many as a sign of the times, deemed a paltry attendance for a Mayo championship match. Yet those hardy few and fervent locals would still have found a way to get loud and influence the tie if Enda Hession or Jordan Flynn had gone on a barnstorming run, or if O’Shea had come out to pull a kick-out right out of the cloudless sky, or if Ryan O’Donoghue jinked his way across the line and sent a two-pointer over the bar.

Even a David McBrien hit, solid enough to collect a yellow card and send a message of intent at the same time, might have roused the home side out of their torpor. The players needed the crowd to get them going, the crowd needed the players to set them off, and by the time the final whistle sounded, they looked at each other like a pair of teenagers who went home from the disco unfulfilled, purely because neither had the mettle to make the first move to get the action underway.

Even when it came to the sideline, the options taken were completely lacking in Mayo-ness. First in was Fenton Kelly, a player who even his most ardent supporters would say is “capable of doing a decent job for you”, but whose introduction wouldn’t have sent heart-rate readings soaring on any Fitbits in the stadium. Given the state of play, he could best be described as a battery torch at a fireworks display. He’ll come in handy, but this wasn’t the time.

By the time the real game-breakers (Paddy Durcan, Paul Towey, Fergal Boland) were sent in, there was 10 minutes left and Cavan were four points clear. Not a no-hope situation - the Offaly minor footballers will tell you that - but not exactly giving those alchemists enough time to brew up the right magic formula either.

And while it has taken us half the column to get there, the plan was always to look at this situation through blue-tinted glasses, and to assess what all this means for Cavan. How much of Mayo’s showing was down to their existential crisis, and how much could be attributed to Raymond Galligan’s side taking a huge step forward in the way they knocked over a Division 1 team that isn’t Monaghan for the first time since the 2020 Ulster final?

Or to put it another way, if this team has found their “Cavan-ness”, what does that mean, and what does it look like?

It’s fiercely tempting for this non-Cavan native to insert a stereotype joke here, but we’ll move swiftly on and just say with a straight face that this was a win built on miserly defensive play.

Until O’Shea scored that goal in the 74th minute, Mayo’s starting forward line scored one point – and that, somewhat ironically, was a Darren McHale effort at the end of a possession that came from a stray pass by Pádraig Faulkner.

Faulkner bounced back from that error to make one vital block and win three turnovers so the Kingscourt man’s account was very much in credit by the end, but all around him there were stars. Niall Carolan’s lockdown job against Ryan O’Donoghue topped the bill but Killian Brady also got the better of Aidan O’Shea, Cian Reilly was devastatingly effective at both ends of the pitch, and Ciarán Brady took Mayo playmaker Jack Carney out of the game and still had the scope to make a significant contribution at the other end.

Galligan spoke about the importance of match-ups afterwards and these battles were critical, but no less important was Cavan’s ability to identify where to attack, and who were the weak links. Footballing intelligence and reading of the game was crucial as Cavan set about playing into the wind, and their attacking game involved several direct runs from the top of the new arc, often depending on which Mayo tackler manned that critical spot at the time.

This strategy was deployed with the understanding that many of these bursts would end in turnovers, but that the opening 35 minutes was all about trying to stay in touch, rather than trying to build a big total.

Ciarán Brady’s score came from this approach; one or two such darting runs, on and off the ball, were integral to Cormac O’Reilly’s point to make it 0-4 each, and the most important part of this was that when it came to the transition from attack to defence, every time a Cavan player did get swallowed up by Mayo bodies in that congested piece of real estate, the team reset quickly to make sure they were never caught out.

Equally, Mayo showed none of the sharpness on the break that Cavan themselves displayed in the second half.

That sharpness, that instinct to go right down the middle and, in martial arts parlance, ‘hit to hurt’, was shown again by Ciarán Brady after half-time when his quick free created the space for Gerard Smith’s goal.

The fact that it was Enda Hession, Mayo’s best runner from deep in the absence of Eoghan McLaughlin, that opened the door by getting pinged for over-carrying, only furthered the sense that Cavan had blunted the sharpest weapons in the Mayo arsenal.

It was in the final 20 minutes that Cavan-ness was most evident.

To this observer, that spirit manifests in a rising sense of belief that the footballing quality was there to win with style rather than ‘engineering’ a victory through any single method. It comes through in a willingness to try something special; whether that was Oisín Kiernan’s two-pointer, or Ciarán Brady being chased down by two Mayo tacklers, running the wrong way and with no pass on, coming up with a sensational change of direction that sent both befuddled westerners to the shops.

As the Arva man just put his head up and played on as if this was the most natural thing in the world for the a man to do in his own corner-back sector, it was hard not to think of Damien O’Reilly’s (Cormac’s Dad) hooked volley for a point against Donegal in 1992, and how it would take a bit of Cavan-ness to even think of doing it.

Of course the problem with Offaly-ness, Cavan-ness, Mayo-ness, and all the other nesses that make up the personalities of these magically arbitrary and yet oh-so fundamental things we call counties, is that there is the good and the bad. It was written of the Offaly hurlers once that if you said they had absolutely no good forward in the team, nothing there from jerseys 10-15, then the next game out, just to make an ape of you, they’d hurl so bad that it was like they were proving that they had nothing from jerseys one to nine either.

Likewise with Cavan, that tendency to land a punch out of nowhere hasn’t always been matched by the ability to build on a strong foundation and reach even greater heights. Particularly when a Tyrone team is anywhere on the horizon. But that’s a concern for another day.

First up is Donegal, a side widely-regarded as the best-coached team in Ireland. Their methods, their physicality and athleticism, all of those qualities are abundant and impressive. Other counties would be beaten before they start.

But with a healthy dollop of Cavan-ness clearly coursing through this Breffni side’s veins, that shouldn’t be the case here.