End to End: Cavan county board have an image problem

By Paul Fitzpatrick

News began to spread last Friday morning that Maghera MacFinns might not be fielding for their Junior Championship match against Belturbet the following day. It was shocking but not surprising.

The Meath border club, one of the county’s oldest units, have been mired at the foot of junior ranks for a long time now. They are a special case; they went over a decade without winning a match at one point.

Last year, they didn’t field in the Junior Championship; this season, they finished bottom of Division 4 of the All-County League, averaging a 19-point loss across their eight games. We’re not sure what the reasons are and they aren’t relevant to this article in any case.

Whatever way it is sliced and diced, it’s a messy situation. Where it gets messier is that score difference is crucial in deciding quarter-final positions in Cavan’s championship format – yet Maghera giving a walkover last weekend means that the Rorys did not get to play their full complement of matches and, as such, score difference could not be employed, which raised the vista of play-offs and a potential hold-up.

Yet even though Maghera’s intentions were widely known on Friday morning and official notification was received later that day, it was Monday evening before anything was decided and relayed in relation to the matter. As it turned out, agreement was reached and, thankfully, a play-off was avoided.

This writer was contacted by numerous clubs – players and officials – on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday wondering what might happen; the quarter-finals were pencilled in for this coming weekend and teams naturally wanted to make plans.

If you’re an alt rock fan, it may have brought to mind Queens of the Stone Age’s 2002 classic No-One Knows. “We get some rules to follow / That and this, these and those / No-one knows…”

Whether Cavan county board are doing a good job or not is subjective; we would argue that for the most part they are – and much of what they do is unglamorous, thankless work. There are excellent people involved, with the best interests of the association at heart.

For example, from a media point of view, Communications Officer Mark Gilsenan ran a super championship launch and another for the minor finals, which was a welcome addition.

In isolation, the delay in dealing with the problem caused by Maghera’s withdrawal is hardly a crisis. But it seems to me to be the latest in a series of small, avoidable issues which have left the custodians of the GAA in this county with an image problem.

Exhibit A: For a decade, the board have been running a terrific service on X/Twitter, posting score-by-score updates from almost all championship matches.

Twitter, seeking to monetise, changed its rules of late, however. Limitless tweets are no longer allowed; the county board comms team found that their account was blocked on occasion by the platform.

The board released a 200-word statement explaining the situation.

“Please note,” it stressed, “that this is not a subscription issue!!”

Advice had been sought from Croke Park and by the following weekend Cavan’s account was displaying the blue tick denoting a paid subscription. The restrictions disappeared - and lo, the tweets did flow.

Another major bone of contention for football people has been the change of approach to the weekly championship draws. For a number of years, the draws took place on a Sunday evening on the pitch during half-time of a match. This proved popular but there was a move away from it; it was felt, not unreasonably, that it could have an unfair bearing on the second half of said match and, at a basic level, there sometimes wasn’t enough time to conduct the draw during the interval.

But there has been little clarity about when the draws might be conducted; one intermediate club secretary informed us that they had not received notification of same during this championship nor who the linespeople and fourth officials were, which they said would have been the case in the past. In the vacuum of information, frustration grows.

U12 finals

And I think there was a serious misstep in recent weeks around the U12 finals, too. The context is important.

Cavan’s spending on inter-county teams is relatively well-managed compared to some counties – Martin Cahill, the current Head of Operations and Secretary and former Treasurer, always presented a very thorough and transparent financial report and often warned against unchecked expenditure in this regard.

Yet it remains north of €1.1 million, which equates to just under €5,000 a day over an eight-month season to cover the costs of running county football and hurling teams. The board has recently received planning permission for a major capital project at Kingspan Breffni, which will run into millions, too.

Many supporters we spoke to were sickened, then, to be charged €2 for children to attend U12 finals recently. Yes, as one officer noted, “the bills have to be paid” and the new underage system, which has been well received, brings with it higher costs for referees and so on.

Nobody seriously argues that €2 is an unaffordable admission charge; that wasn’t the point. When an organisation spending that sort of money annually on county teams asks a parent to go online and buy a ticket for a six-year-old to watch his or her sibling in an U12 final, the optics are not good. That it happened at all is concerning.

The board’s website is another issue. It used to be simple to navigate the fixtures section; that is no longer the case. To look through results for adult men’s football matches in a particular grade, I must wade through ladies football, camogie and underage.

This has been the case all year. When we raised it months ago, the word back was that it was the same across the country with counties using centralised software. Yet other counties’ fixtures sections do not seem to be such a maze. Why can this not be sorted?

The website has a Coaching & Games section and boldly states that “Our Latest News section will have current information on all sections of Coaching & Games” – yet I could only find a measly four posts since November, 2020.

What also hasn’t helped is Dermot McCabe’s relationship with the local media. His influence is vast; he is the Head of Games, the county senior manager, the county U15 squad manager among other roles. In ways, especially with his standing as a player in his day, he is the face of Cavan GAA.

When someone whose fingerprints are all over so many areas of the board’s remit has difficulties with the local media, that’s a problem.

Reflection

While this has been, overall, an enjoyable club season thus far, there is a sense the natives are restless. The bread and circuses of the club championship soap opera will be over in a couple of months, winter will set in and maybe some reflection will come with it.

In that regard, we logged on to CavanGAA.ie to re-read the most recent five-year Strategic Plan. In a comic twist, the link was broken.

The board is drawn from and representative of the clubs of Cavan and does a lot of good work, much of it unseen and unheralded. But perception matters.

And, crucially, if they are to bring the public along, they must be seen to do so.