“You’d think one of them would throw a f**kin’ slap!”

Cavanman's Diary

"You're the lad who was writing about Cavan and Monaghan lately,” a steward said to me on the way in on Sunday.

I wasn’t sure which piece he was referring to, whether he was appreciative or accusatory, but I agreed that I was; I usually am. When you’re working for the Anglo-Celt, covering Gaelic football a lot of the time, you’re going to be writing about Cavan and Monaghan. That’s just the way it goes, the way it's always gone.

Cliche says the rivalry lies dormant before erupting like a volcano every time the teams meet. Or at least, it used to. If Sunday is anything to go by, football’s oldest tie – Cavan versus Monaghan in the Ulster Championship – is in its diminished last days.

The exchanges were as tame as we’ve ever seen them. One decorated former Cavan defender, exasperated, struck a note: “You’d think one of them would throw a f**kin’ slap!” he cried. And not that we’re condoning violence, you understand, but he had a point.

Last week, on these pages, we carried a piece by Jack Madden, Cremartin of Gowna lineage, with Terry Hyland. Accompanying it was a photo of Hyland and two of his players after losing by a point to Monaghan in the Ulster quarter-final in 2015. In it, Terry wears a pained expression; on the right, Martin Reilly, back to the camera, has his hands on his hips, like a man returning home to find his house has been flooded, surveying the damage.

On the left, Rory Dunne cannot bear it; he has both hands covering his eyes. Rory’s from downtown Redhills, same as me; losing to Monaghan stings.

I thought of that photo again on Sunday. The game over, nobody in the Cavan camp looked gutted. Players signed autographs, chilled in the warm breeze with family and friends. I’m sure it hurt but, outwardly, there were no signs. Maybe times have moved on – or maybe, the Ulster Championship and these days just don’t mean as much any more.

In last week’s paper, we also carried an interview with iconic former Monaghan footballer Bernie Murray, accompanied by an old photo in which he looks like a surfer (is there surf in Scotstown?) or a member of an ‘80s rock band.

“In 1988 we were hurt,” Bernie recalled (Cavan had beaten Monaghan narrowly in ’87).

“Sean McCague came back in as manager and we trained damn hard. We couldn’t contemplate being beaten by Cavan again. I remember vividly sitting watching the minor game and I’d never felt stress or pressure like it before a match.”

It was notable on Sunday that there was none of that tension. I watched just after two o’clock as first the Monaghan squad and then Cavan got off their buses and made their way in. None bore the haunted looks of men heading for the front line. Among the supporters, it was all relaxed, too.

It wasn't always that way, of course, on these Ulster days. The journalist Michael Foley once recounted an incident at a Derry v Tyrone clash, which summed up my own memories of big Ulster matches growing up.

“When they met in the 1992 Ulster championship, Derry had won six successive games against Tyrone by two points, including a league final that spring,” Foley wrote.

“The BBC had agreed to carry the game live but refused to broadcast the national anthem before the match. Once the song finished, there was a delay waiting for the nod from the TV producer to start. Players started bouncing off each other and getting in each other’s ears. One Tyrone supporter started doing press-ups on the terrace to release the adrenalin.”

Anyway, the steward. “Are you expecting a big crowd?” I asked him.

“Four and a half thousand,” he said, “maybe five with the good weather.”

It looked about right to me and those around me so eyebrows were raised when the official attendance of close to 7,800 – exactly half the number who attended that 1987 match, at a time when the population of both counties was considerably lower -  was announced.

I scanned the place for the trappings of championship. The window at the back of the press box in St Tiernach’s Park provides a bird’s eye view. Soon enough, there was the Kingscourt Brass and Reed band, disembarked from their Sillan Tours bus and warming up in the car park. Finally, some pageantry to remind us of what the day should be, I thought.

I wandered down to the back of the stand to tune into a different frequency. Eavesdropping is always good to fill a few lines on match days but all I heard was one band member telling another, “easy for you to say, you’re a drummer”. Everyone laughed; there were no butterflies fluttering here, either.

I retreated to the gantry. The hurling was in full swing when I met one of Cavan’s greatest footballers, Ray Carolan, a man who they say could bend those old Ulster maelstroms to his will. He told me with a laugh that he was only ever knocked out on the field once – playing hurling for Castlerahan. And by his own man.

Twenty minutes into the main event, Cavan were guilty of similar accidental self-sabotage. Their defensive system lay in ruins, Monaghan, playing with a real zip, had scored nine of the first 10 points.

At half-time, the Kingscourt boys (drummers and all) did their best to bring back the spirit of the ‘60s, with a rousing rendition of I Saw Her Standing There, but even that didn’t get the crowd going – or certainly not the vanishingly-small Cavan cohort.

Two goals in the second half brought the Breffnimen back into it as Monaghan seemed to be wilting but the scores dried up in the last 10 minutes, Beggan found his range and Monaghan won by seven points, a cricket score in this fixture. Cavan and Monaghan have met more often than any other two sides in the Ulster Championship; in all those years, only once – the 1930 Ulster final – had Monaghan won by as much as seven points before.

There was a story behind that game, too. Monaghan had won the 1929 final in Carrickmacross; trains were late, the venue was wedged and a lot of Cavan supporters couldn’t see the action.

When the final was again fixed for Carrick the following July - under pressure from local traders, the conspiracy theory reckoned - Cavan objected strenuously at a meeting in Conlon’s Hotel in Clones. The Cavan rep, Mr G. McGovern, made an impassioned speech, concluding that he “hoped the council would decide in his favour but he wished to say, no matter how the game ended, the two counties would remain good friends as they always had been and always would be”.

Cavan threatened to boycott the game but, in the end, fielded a weakened team and Monaghan won easily. Ninety-six years on, things remain friendly; far too friendly, unfortunately, to bring out the crowds and raise that championship drumbeat again.