1997 Ulster champions to be honoured

GAA news

While Donegal and Derry will obviously take centre stage this Sunday in Clones at the Ulster final, there will be significant Cavan interest, with the Breffni county’s 1997 Ulster SFC-winning panel and management the guests of honour on the day.

Twenty-five years on from that memorable win over Derry, the group will be introduced to the crowd at half-time and, says their captain Stephen King, it is an occasion they are all looking forward to.

“First of all, we decided to come together for the 20th anniversary in 2017. Everybody is healthy and alive and we thought it would be a good idea. The 25th was always going to be a big one and we were going to organise something ourselves anyway but in fairness the Ulster Council have us pencilled in and will run this for us along with our own county board,” King told the Anglo-Celt.

“We’re more than delighted with that and in particular with our own county board.

“The format is that we will meet up and have Mass on Sunday morning and then we will have breakfast in the Meadow View and be brought down to Clones for the match and we are going to be introduced to the crowd at half-time in the senior match and when it’s over, we’ll be brought back to the Hotel Kilmore for dinner.

“We’re going to have the panel of 28 players and partners and the team management and selectors and county board officials at the time so I would reckon we are going to have in excess of 80 people in total including some of the present county board officers.”

Most of the members of the 1997 Cavan panel still reside in the county and have kept up fairly close contact over the years.

“Most of the lads are still around Cavan, I don’t know of anyone very far away. We set up our own WhatsApp group and we are very confident everyone is available for all the festivities, we hope to have a few refreshments on Sunday night as well after the meal.

“It’s like every pool of players, there will be a group of seven, eight who will see each other quite a bit at matches and things like that. But then there would be a certain core of players you wouldn’t see, there would be some I wouldn’t have seen since the 20th anniversary get-together.

“I’m sure there are a lot of guys who wouldn’t have met other members of the panel. It’s the management and the county board at the time, we were a very tight-knit group at the time I have to say.”

For Stephen, it doesn’t feel like 25 years ago.

“Oh Jesus! It’s unbelievable and us going round thinking we’re only 30 years of age!” he laughed.

“They were memories that will last forever. The winning of it was great but and I’m sure the lads would agree, playing with your club and playing with your county was marvellous. There were lads who went on to play for Ulster and Ireland and got great enjoyment out of all that.”

As the years have gone on, meeting old foes has also been a rewarding experience.

“You would. I bump into the likes of Anthony Molloy if we were playing Donegal, Tony Scullion from Derry, Ross Carr and James McCartan from Down, lots of lads like that and there is a great friendship there. Even at the Cavan race day recently, I met Darragh Ó Sé and was delighted to meet him, I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

“The friends you make are unbelievable. The GAA is great I think.”

The landscape in Ulster at the time was unique in GAA history as anything up to half a dozen of the best teams in the country vied for supremacy each summer.

Between 1992 and 2003, Donegal, Down, Derry, Tyrone and Armagh all won All-Ireland titles and Cavan claimed an Ulster.

“There was great competitiveness that time. I still think the Ulster Championship is sacrosanct because, like Cavan in 2020, people weren’t thinking we could win it but most teams in Ulster have the potential to win the Ulster Championship.

“We see strong performances from various counties, we saw this year that Cavan performed very well against Donegal for example. There is a chance for nearly every county to win the Ulster Championship in my opinion.”

Having exited Ulster, Cavan now enter the Tailteann Cup and King believes it is a very worthwhile competition.

“I am in favour of it. I think it will bring teams on. I think it needs to be marketed properly, it hasn’t been marketed the way I would like to see it done but I am fully in favour of it.

“I think teams like Cavan will grasp the opportunity and put in a real good effort to try and win it. There are a lot of pluses to the Tailteann Cup, a lot more pluses than there are negatives.”

Cavan suffered a string of first-round losses between 1988 and 1994 and it is often stated that had there been a back door, the county’s breakthrough may have come sooner.

“It would have kept the team together. In those years there were no qualifiers either, in other years you could have got a few matches in the qualifiers but back then, when you were out, you were out.

“I think the more matches county teams can get, the better, within reason. With respect, I don’t think we are All-Ireland contenders and there are an awful lot of counties the same so the qualifiers wasn’t a great gig for us but it is a great gig if Tyrone are knocked out or Mayo or Kerry. They are All-Ireland contenders but the weaker counties aren’t, that’s why I’m in favour of the Tailteann Cup because the teams that are in it can actually win it.

“I’d actually like to see a back door in the provincial championship, that if you’re knocked out in the first round, you get a chance to come into the back door in a competition that you can win. It makes more sense than being put into the All-Ireland which realistically you haven’t got a chance of winning.

“But we have the Tailteann Cup now and I think we should definitely be giving it a chance.

“I think Cavan are going in the right direction. I love that the negativity is gone, they are going forward and played lots of ball inside to the likes of Paddy Lynch and James Smith and these guys, and they did extremely well in winning the ball and getting a shot off.”

As for the big game on Sunday, Stephen’s money is on Donegal.

“I fancied Donegal before there was a ball kicked to win Ulster, even though Cavan were that side of the draw. I’m not surprised Derry are in the final, I definitely picked them to beat Tyrone but I wasn’t as confident that they would beat Monaghan, in fairness I thought Monaghan might have been too strong for them.

“They’re going to stick with Donegal, Donegal will know they’re in a game. Derry are a really, really good outfit and very well coached.”

Between now and then, the craic will be good on the 1997 group chat, he joked.

“The WhatsApp group is great, a few boys like Larry and Fintan have been throwing in spoilers! I’m really looking forward to it, it’s a great opportunity to meet up with everybody and their partners. We are long-time friends and it’s a pity we don’t meet up more often.

“It’s 25 years now and speaking to a few of the lads, we are going to try to make it an annual link-up whether that be for a golf event or after a county final or some Cavan match, we’re going to meet up once a year from this year on.”

• The Anglo-Celt will be producing a supplement to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1997 success in the issue of July 20 next.