Defensive frailties the root cause of heavy defeats

Opinion: End to End

When the final whistle sounded in Kingspan Breffni 10 days ago, there was a sense of being punch drunk. Cavan had played well for long spells, holding wind-assisted Donegal to 0-11 in the first 34 minutes. But from there till the end of the match, unthinkably, they leaked 3-15, in the process setting an unwanted record as the highest score Cavan have ever conceded in a senior match.

When Dublin hit them for 5-17 in the championship last summer, it felt like The Worst Ever. A year on, Donegal finished with a scarcely-believable 3-26; even allowing for the new rules, they still landed 3-25. To ship 28 scores in a championship match is, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, unfortunate but to concede 31 scores a week later, as happened in Enniskillen on Sunday, looks like carelessness.

When the Cavan camp combed through the wreckage after Donegal, they would have found something to cling to, like when a religious relic miraculously survives a house fire. There were positives; the final scoreline felt freakish, Donegal had been rattled. If your faith was strong enough, you could put it down to the mysterious ways of championship football and dare to hope for better last Sunday.

But only the most devout – and they are dwindling in number – could suck up the penance a tub-thumping Tyrone administered on Sunday.

Falling attendances and the general chatter among the supporters suggest there is a growing disconnect between the Cavan team and the fans.

The leading managers, such as Jim McGuinness (even though his shtick is growing tiresome) and Padraic Joyce, recognise that there is an opportunity via the media to send thinly-veiled messages both to the supporters and their own players – witness how those two constantly reference the fans in their public utterings – and, yes, control the narrative in some way. The Cavan camp tend to limit access which is not ideal.

Sunday was a perfect storm.Cavan, clearly devoid of confidence, spurned chance after chance; at the other end, while Tyrone had a day of days in front of the posts and at times couldn’t miss, they were smarter in how they moved the ball and had much more conviction in their shooting.

But while the post-mortems around the county have tended to focus on that attacking malfunction, the truth is that the current sieve-like Cavan side is one of the weakest defensively the county has turned out.

It’s easy to pinpoint where it went awry – round six of the league against Armagh last year – but harder to say why.

Things started well with three clean sheets against Kildare, Donegal and Cork and even though the 3-9 conceded against Louth looked ugly at the time, Cavan won that game and followed up with another creditable defensive showing on a wintry night against Meath, letting just 0-11 past them.

From that point on, though, teams have run through them far too easily. In the 18 matches since, shockingly, the opposition have breached the 25-point mark (including goals) in exactly half. Of the other nine games, opposing teams have hit 20 points, or above, in five. It all adds up to an average concession rate of 24.3 points per game across 18 matches going back to the penultimate match of the 2024 National League.

Even adjusting for the new rules, that is a damning statistic. In the final four matches of last year’s championship, A porous Cavan conceded 9-80, which is just shy of 27 points per game. Disregarding extra time against Tyrone, it amounts to an average concession of 26 points per match – and that was under the old rules.

Fast forward 12 months and, in two matches, Donegal and Tyrone have posted 3-57. On Saturday, Cavan will face David Clifford and Co in Killarney. How is that likely to go? We can all make an informed guess.

It says a lot that the Cavan senior hurling team, in their 12 competitive matches this year in Division 3 (one tier lower than the footballers) of the National League and in the Lory Meagher Cup conceded an average of 21.7 points per game, significantly superior to their big-ball counterparts.

Possibly the most worrying aspect of it all is that, individually, several of the Cavan defenders have played well. Niall Carolan, for example, is probably the outstanding player on the team now while Cian Reilly has come of age and Brían O’Connell has established himself as a solid inter-county defender.

The problem appears to be the system; Cavan are too easy to break down, lack ball-winning options at midfield (where Evan Crowe, still U20, has battled manfully, it must be said) and, most harmfully, are short on resilience, meaning that when a team gets a lead, heads drop and a pasting ensues.

In mitigation, it should be noted that Saturday’s match will be the 10th championship outing on Galligan’s watch against Division 1 opposition; in Mickey Graham’s five years in charge, Cavan only faced eight sides who had played in the top flight that Spring.

Also, the team are working hard and most supporters recognise this. They will be hurting after the recent losses.

Cavan have certainly been handed difficult draws and endured bad luck with injuries and unlike Gabriel Bannigan in Monaghan, who has had a stream of quality young players coming on board, Cavan were not consistently competitive at underage level from 2018 to 2024 inclusive.

There have been some very good days; beating Monaghan by six points in the Ulster Championship last year, out-playing Mayo in Castlebar this season, beating Louth twice, Cork and Roscommon away and finishing in the top half of the Division 2 table on successive occasions represents a good body of work in the context of the team’s performance over the last 50 years.

But the bad days have been so awful as to undo much of the goodwill. Aside from the defensive problems, and maybe this is related to the county’s inattention to underage development, management have been slow to inject new blood into the team.

Of the 20 players Galligan used in his first match as manager, an away win over Kildare, 16 are still on the panel, of whom one (Jason McLoughlin, a starter if fit) is injured. Thirteen of the remaining 15 featured on Sunday against Tyrone and Ryan Donohoe started the previous game against Donegal. It is almost, and we say this jokingly but with a degree of truth, harder to get off the team than on it…

An away trip to Kerry, even though they were very poor themselves against Meath on Saturday, could not be more daunting. It’s clear now that Cavan need to focus on defence, to make themselves hard to break down – that was the same approach Graham tended to fall back on for the big games, which Mattie McGleenan favoured and, when he first took over, Terry Hyland did too.

So, the wheel has come full circle and unless Cavan can tighten up considerably at the back – not an easy thing to do under the new rules – it could get ugly again on Saturday.

All of this would be easier to swallow was it just a poor group of players but what annoys supporters most is that somewhere in there, there is a good team, albeit their progress has been derailed by a chronic lack of consistency. Cavan have shown an ability to play with dash and flair and physicality at times – and then, at others, that’s all absent and they make rookie errors and fold easily.

Chopping and changing managers is the road to no town; we’ve been there too often and while there are exceptions, it rarely works out. Cavan and their manager must persist, be bold in their selections and pragmatic in their tactical approach.

The foundation of any team is to be hard to score against and thus, beat; Cavan are not that and will continue to lose games heavily till they figure out a way to become it. And, worryingly, that’s a lot easier said than done.