FROM THE ARCHIVE: Donegal sink Cavan, May 2011

Donegal have won two major trophies in 12 months and they will win more in the coming months, wrote Paul Fitzpatrick after the Cavan v Donegal match in May 2011.

The “delicious ache” which poet and one-time Breffni goalkeeper Tom MacIntyre wrote about after the All Ireland Under 21 final has been dulling for Cavan football supporters for two generations, a day at a time, defeat by defeat. That young crew gave us great days and nights in the spring but the boys of summer didn’t find the living easy here.

The whisper was everywhere all week and everyone you met was repeating it – it didn’t feel like The Championship. “There’s no buzz at all”, “you wouldn’t think there’s a championship match Sunday”, all that jazz.

It was strange. On big match day, the air is always thick with tension, as it should be, but this felt odd. There was little excitement, just curiosity and a faint sense of dread, rising like the damp as throw-in approached.

Championship Sunday, we thought anyway, is about other things as much as the football; the sizzle and spit of the chip vans, the nasal hollering of day-tripping Dubs selling “hats, scarves, rosettes and-a-headbands”, and the pre-match ramble around town, meeting friends, stomach churning, sun grinning high in the sky.

There was none of that here. No sun, no fun. Just the same old story – pain in the rain, just like Aughrim, just like Páirc Uí Chaoímh. The lads gave it their all, but it wasn’t near enough. Taken into deep water, they sank like a stone, and no amount of desperate splashing was going to keep Cavan afloat.

Not that there weren’t some light-hearted moments - where two tribes congregate, the craic is always good. “Duffy, you’re useless, hi!” yelled a clearly-excitable chap from the stand, with the match just seconds old. In the crammed press box, we were genuinely impressed at how accurate and prompt the prediction was; Marty Duffy is not the best referee we have encountered on this beat.

So, the long whistle unleashed the match and, for the first few minutes, Cavan bit on their gumshields and went toe to toe. Had they been imbued with that under 21 spirit? No – in the eighth minute, the controlled aggression became uncontrolled.

Ray Cullivan, a gentleman to his fingertips off the field, saw red after catching a ball and a man (the former with his hands and the latter with his studs) in the same movement. Duffy got the call right, Cavan were a man down.

“That’s just killed that game, boys,” sighed someone in the press box to nobody in particular. We tended to agree, but, lo, Marty doth giveth and Marty doth taketh away. Nine minutes later, the corpse began to twitch when Michael Murphy felled Damien O’Reilly on the far side of the field. The Cavan debutant stayed down and the crowd, sensing something, rose up as one.

Would it be evened up? Only Marty had the answer, to paraphrase the ad, and the man in black, of course, evened it up, harshly sending mercurial Murphy – who was impersonating the schoolyard bully in any case – to the line for his stupid shoulder. You could smell the sap rising. Now we had a chance – we had space, we had time, we had a shot. We could’ve had it all, as the song said. But we would finish with less than nothing.

The opening salvos thus fired, a pattern eventually stitched itself to the match, and it wasn’t a attractive one. Cavan were out-muscled and, too often, backed up, staring at a wall of garish yellow shirts. There is one thing a frustrated supporter hates more than seeing his team forced to play the ball backwards, sideways, losing ground and losing heart, and that’s doing it while getting soaked under merciless, dark grey clouds.

The lateral waltz was spoiled every now and then when Donegal stepped on Cavan’s toes and upped the tempo. Playing at their own rhythm, the Tir Chonnail men were illuminating.

And nothing Cavan tried worked. The sight of captain Sean Johnston, the best forward our 40 clubs have to send out, scuttling back as Karl Lacey, nominally the second last line of defence, galloped forward, was startling. “Jelly” even picked up a short kick-out from James Reilly at one stage, 28 players and 130 metres between him and the goal he was attacking. We looked at each other and shook our heads. Strange day, indeed.

Is it worth reading anything into the warm-up? Donegal, bibbed and ripped, had looked the part in theirs at the town end.  They were focused, furrow-browed and fit – not that Cavan weren’t – and were here to do a job, and to hell with anyone who begrudged them any success their cautious approach might earn. Jim McGuinness offers no apologies for it (shouldn’t it be the losing manager and not the winning one who, backed against the wall – literally – by the press pack, is forced to make excuses?) and he’s right. He has won two major trophies in the past 12 months, and will win more in the months to come.

Late in the day, Donegal emptied their bench and the likes of Michael Hegarty and Brick Molloy took their chances. One passage of play summed it up. Durkan to Gallagher to Molloy – too easy. That point made it 2-12 to 0-7 with time almost up.

The match played out, supporters, leaden-legged and wet, slunk off, the steamed-up windscreens in the traffic jam hiding their disappointment. Another harsh lesson from the hardest school of all. Life may begin at 40 but Cavan are stuck on 39 Ulster titles and look as far away from rebirth as ever, despite the best efforts of players and management.

Yeah, it didn’t feel like championship Sunday. But it sure felt a lot worse on Monday.