If those walls could talk: The story of '97 - Part 1

An oral history of Cavan's 1997 Ulster SFC success

Cavan’s momentous victory in 1997 was years in the making. To look back, PAUL FITZPATRICK spoke to Fintan Cahill, Ciaran Brady, Ronan Carolan, Stephen King, Damien O’Reilly, Anthony Forde, Jason O’Reilly, Philip Kermath, Bernard Morris and Raymond Cunningham as well as manager Martin McHugh.

(Read part 2 here).

By the end of the 1994 season, the Cavan senior football team were in a bad place. Despite the best efforts of those involved, the county had not won an Ulster title in 25 years – the previous longest famine, which ended in 1962, was seven years – and had, in fact, not won a match at all in the championship since 1988.

Despite there being lots of talented players, the former kingpins of Ulster were struggling to win a championship match at any grade of football.

From 1988 to 1994 inclusive, Cavan had lost the first round seven years in succession, often in close games. Ulster football was dog-eat-dog and the standard was extraordinarily high, with Down, Donegal and Derry having won the previous four All-Ireland between them.

Fintan Cahill: What was Ulster football like? You just really would want to have eyes in the back of your head. Prior to the time when you had tees to put the ball on, a rule was brought in that you couldn’t be digging the field during the game so they’d make these little mounds in the corners for kicking the ball out from at the start of the game.

I had roomed with Gary Walsh in the Railway Cup. Up in Ballybofey for the replay in ’92, it was absolutely pissing rain. I came walking in and I saw the mound and I looked up at Gary and he just said ‘don’t you f**king dare do it, Cahill’.

I made a run at it anyway and kicked it. Half of it went over the bar, another lump of it stuck here, a big clob of shite hit him in the face. This was before the ball was thrown in! The blood drained from his face and he went green.

And he ran out and he battered me. And Matt Gallagher got stuck in as well and then Doherty busted me. It was a full battering match. I didn’t know where I was and I looked at the two umpires and they were looking the other way, as much as to say ‘well, you deserved it’.

That was Ulster football. I never played it any other way, it was a case of getting your retaliation in first.

Ciaran Brady: There were a lot of bleak years there where we were getting beat in the first round. It wasn’t for the lack of effort.

In years before that, when we lost the first round for seven years in a row, if there was a back door it could have made a huge difference to that team. There were years going in and you’d be playing Derry or Donegal… there was a lot of tension. When we were expected to win it brought additional pressure.

Ronan Carolan: I wouldn't say it was bleak. We were quite close. It was a very competitive environment. You're talking about the early-to-mid '90s, when Ulster teams were winning All-Irelands, or very close to winning All-Irelands. We played a Donegal team four years in a row and while Martin [McHugh] will tell you that they always thought they were going to beat us - he says with a smile on his face - we rattled them in most games we played them in. Those games were in the melting pot until around 10 minutes to go.

We'd beaten Monaghan in Breffni Park in ’87 when Jim Reilly was absolutely brilliant. Eugene McGee introduced a whole raft of lads my age; you're talking about Damien O’Reilly, Vivian Dowd, Dessie Brady, myself, Sean Pierson and we got to an U21 All-Ireland final, so things were going quite well. That U21 team in ’88 was more than half of the ’97 team, or certainly the panel.

Unfortunately that ’88 team didn't win an All-Ireland U21 title because that would have been a massive lift. The unfortunate thing at the time was there was no back door, so you played one game and you were gone and then you had to brain-wash yourself for a few months and then go back and play your three, or four, league games before Christmas, then a few after and then prepare for the Championship.

There was no lack of confidence.

Fintan Cahill: All of the championship games we ever played were knock-out. There was no back door. I just remember the training and it was fairly archaic stuff and I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way.

It was what was done at the time, a lot of laps. I used to thumb from Dundalk to Kingscourt and then get a lift to Cavan and do the training. And then it was literally one game – you played the league and your championship was one outing. I came in in ’88 and before ’95, I hadn’t seen one victory. I missed a couple of years through injury.

We played Antrim in 1995 and that was the first time I’d seen us win a game in the championship.

There was a huge amount of good players there in those years, there really was.

But we always seemed to be getting pipped by those couple of points. Monaghan, Donegal… we had a couple of tight run-ins with Derry.

There were some huge players. I absolutely, thoroughly, really enjoyed it. As far as I was concerned, it was the be-all and end-all, playing county football. You were in with all these great players.

We drew with Donegal in ’92 and okay, they gave us a bit of a dressing in the replay but that’s how close things were. We were very, very close but just didn’t do it.

Bernard Morris: We had some great teams, I played with some great players as a young lad with Cavan. A bit of bad luck probably stopped us from making the breakthrough. You had the Faulkners, Jim Reilly, Joe Dillon, Barry McArdle. They were the older players when I came in, then I was in their role later on when Jason, Larry, Peter, Dermot, Mickey and all those boys came on stream.

Martin McHugh: I had played against Cavan and I knew there was good talent in Cavan. I knew the quality of the players.

We drew with Cavan in ’92 and probably should have been beaten so the quality was there.

In 1988, Cavan were in an U21 All-Ireland final and Ronan Carolan was injured; if he’d played you feel Cavan would have won that All-Ireland so I always felt there was a lot of talent in Cavan.

Anthony Forde: Cavan hadn’t won a championship game in seven years. There were big games, in ’92 they went to-to-toe with Donegal in Breffni and it did capture the imagination, you could see the support that was there when you were able to compete.

At underage level, you’re coming from west Cavan. Getting on the team first and foremost if your first priority, trying to compete then after that. We were beaten in ’94 in the Ulster Minor Championship by a point by Monaghan in Breffni Park, a dour enough affair. I was the first boy whipped off in that game and I remember leaving Breffni Park that day thinking to myself ‘will I ever grace this sod again?’.

Genuinely, like. I would have felt, ‘this could be it’. I often tell young lads now that less than 12 months later I came on in an Ulster senior final, that was my senior debut.

Stephen King: We have spoken about this. We should have been winning more in my earlier years. You take that whole Kingscourt connection, Jim Reilly, the Faulkners, and then Paddy McNamee and Derek McDonnell and Martin Lynch from Ramor, great footballers and I could name dozens more.

We were doing well in leagues and things like that but we should have been doing better in the championship. Of course, it was knock-out that time. To me, we had the quality players to do better but I don’t know where it fell short.

Did I ever feel like packing it in? Several times. We went through a bad run, getting beaten in the first round of the championship, and after that match you’d say ‘well f**k this, that’s it for me’.

But you went back to your club and you got a run or whatever with them and then the National League would start again in October. Sure, come October, you’d have forgotten about losing in the championship, it was great to get back, see the lads!

When you were beaten in the first round of the championship, it’s not a nice place.

I remember Antrim beating us in the first round and we got a fair bit of abuse coming off the field. And probably rightly so. That was a big downer.

Damien O’Reilly: Previous managers like PJ Carroll, Gabriel Kelly, Eamon Curley, they all tried their utmost but we just didn’t have that belief that we could go and win an Ulster title. Now, we got to Division 1 and did well enough in the league but we just never had the belief to go any further. When McHugh came in ’95, he was in to win something, to be successful. There was definitely a change, and that’s no reflection on the people who were involved before.

Ronan Carolan: I do think that panel was more than good enough if they had an opportunity to play in the back door; there was a possibility then that the ‘97 team could have gone the whole way because they’d have had experience. We were playing really good teams. We were that team that Donal Keogan calls ‘the great seven-in-a-row team’. We were playing teams that were arguably as good as the top two or three teams in the country.

It was a hard ask but it’s an awful pity there wasn’t a back door at that stage because I think we were as good as a lot of teams that were around at the time but the standard in Ulster was particularly hot.

Raymond Cunningham: It was daunting for me starting off in the sense that I was probably considered an outsider, not playing my club football in Cavan at the time. The players, I would have heard of.

Stephen King, Damien O’Reilly, Bernard Morris, they would have been guys who would have been probably 10 years playing with Cavan and had no success. I would have known a lot of the Kingscourt players, Joe Dillon, Pat Faulkner, Mickey Faulkner, guys like that who would have been mainstays of Cavan teams.

They were all great footballers but Cavan normally got beat by the team maybe who went on and won Ulster and there was no back door at that time and that was a problem for Cavan teams at the time – you got one chance and maybe didn’t perform on the day or lost narrowly and then they had to wait for a full year before they could go again at it.

It wasn’t that there were any better footballers in Meath than Cavan, they were very, very similar but Meath were lucky enough to get out of Leinster a few times and they went on and won All-Irelands. That’s sometimes the way football goes, you need a little bit of luck to do well.

Martin McHugh: Being beat seven years in a row in a championship, it got to a stage where it became a bit of a joke on them, “poor Cavan”, a great footballing county and it had got to the stage where they couldn’t win a game in the championship. As well as that, I think the minor team the year before I came in got beaten 0-12 to 0-3 or something and it was a good minor team, they had players like Dermot McCabe on it.

It was nothing to do with the manager or anything else, there was just no confidence in Cavan. And they were good footballers.

Fintan Cahill: I don’t believe people really saw us as a threat. We went up to the Holyrood, myself, Ronan Carolan and Stephen King, to collect Railway Cup medals. Derry had won the All-Ireland that year and Henry Downey came down with the cup.

He was the only Derry player who came even though there were lots more of them involved. Derry didn’t come because they heard Tyrone were coming. And the Monaghan boys were there but Donegal weren’t talking to Derry.

There was this whole dynamic, there were groups of players there and nobody was mingling. But everybody was talking to the Cavan boys. That sickened my hole. We weren’t a threat.

It was a good night’s craic but I swore to Carolan and King on the way home, ‘the next time we’re here, if we’re ever back, I want a situation where nobody really wants to talk to us at all’.

And that did eventually happen. You were just seen as, ‘ah, they’re grand lads but really and truly, when it comes to the bit…’

Damien O’Reilly: We were seen as a soft touch because we weren’t winning enough championship games. They got to a semi-final in 87 in Omagh against Derry but it wasn’t happening very often. Cavan were just taken as a soft touch.

I remember winning a McKenna Cup maybe in ’88 but it was championship you were judged on and we were beaten in the first round far too often.

And that probably led us to not having enough belief. We weren’t doing it often enough to warrant teams looking out for us.

Stephen King: They probably thought ‘these are the nice guys’. There seemed to be more rivalry with other counties, you could probably see the bitterness there. Maybe that was from being more competitive than Cavan were.

We probably should have been more competitive particularly with the calibre of player that we had.

We had quality players and we didn’t win enough.

After losing to Monaghan in 1994, Cavan manager PJ Carroll stepped down.

A long list of names were linked with the job but, on August 1, Martin McHugh, recently retired as a Donegal player, was ratified at a county board meeting.

Martin McHugh: I played my last county game actually in Breffni Park against Tyrone and I hurt my medial ligament that day, I went off injured and we got beat that day in an Ulster semi-final. Brian McEniff then stepped down as manager of Donegal so the job came up and I went for it, probably to do maybe one year as player-manager and I put a good backroom team together.

Anyway I went for that job, didn’t get it and next thing Brendan Keaney, the Cavan chairman, rang me. The fact that I was interested in going into management, would I be interested in coming to Cavan?

Then I had a decision to make, would I stop playing football or whatever? I was hoping to play for another year at least because I was just 33 at that time. I figured out then that the fact I went for the job in Donegal and didn’t get it, it would be very awkward on me playing and very awkward on the manager PJ McGowan.

If I didn’t play well, they’d say I didn’t want to bother playing. It was just an awkward one on everybody. I wanted to finish on a reasonably good note as such and I just thought that the best thing to do for everybody’s sake was to pull away from it.

I was very disappointed not to get the Donegal job at the time because I thought myself that I could have done a great job and I actually believed there were a better bunch of players coming even than the bunch of players who had won the All-Ireland.

They were a very strong team starting to come, there were a lot of great young footballers like John Duffy, Declan Boyle and these who had had played that year with me and I just felt myself there was something exciting happening in Donegal that time.

But anyway it didn’t materialise and one day I was in Dublin, I got a phone call from Brendan Keaney asking me.

I probably had no interest in it at that time but I met Brendan in Cavan that day in the house and we had a great old talk. There was a committee in place, a seven, eight, maybe nine-person committee, to pick the manager so I made my decision then, ‘I think I’ll go for this anyway and see what happens’. There were probably other people in for it as well.

Fintan Cahill: It happened very quickly. Brendan Keaney just brought him in and said there’s your man. I got the sense that he was more than just a player in Donegal, I heard that from Donegal lads. It was McEniff and McHugh, it wasn’t just McEniff.

It came very natural to him, to talk and discuss football. After the first couple of sessions and particularly after his first meeting, he does empower you with that sense of belief that he knows what he’s talking about.

Whether he does or he doesn’t is kind of irrelevant but it turns out he did.

Massive authority and he commanded a huge amount of respect and it wasn’t just because he had a medal.

There was huge hunger in the team for success, Stephen, myself, Damien, Morris, we hadn’t seen a victory. It literally was a case that if he said stand on your head, you stood on your head.

Stephen King: I was actually on the committee set out to pick a manager and when he came in, we knew he had been successful as a player.

His equalising free in ’92 was a killer for us but at the same time, in fairness, there was no way we’d have gone on and won the All-Ireland.

Brendan Keaney was head of the committee. Jim Reilly was on it as well and some other county board officials, maybe Jim McDonnell or Ray Carolan. We used to meet in the Kilmore. There were a few names in the mix and his was floating to the top all the time.

It was a big stab to take with a guy who hadn’t managed before and from he arrived, he showed what he was about straight away. And he had a good management team, Mickey Reilly, Donal Donohoe were great and it was a big thing to have someone like Joe Doonan training the team.

Damien O’Reilly: We knew there would be a new Cavan manager and McHugh was actually working with Mullahoran for about three weeks or a month before that. I remember playing full-forward in a training match and him refereeing it.

Then all of a sudden, the word got round that he was going to be the new Cavan manager which was a bit of a surprise because he wasn’t long finished playing and really hadn’t much managerial experience and all of a sudden he was becoming the Cavan manager.

It was hard to comprehend it at that time, he was living in Donegal and was on the road for Martin Donnelly. It came out of leftfield.

Ronan Carolan: There was a buzz; people were happy. Martin played against us and the Donegal and Cavan teams always got on pretty well. There was a buzz and it was a brave move. There was a fair bit of criticism because Martin didn’t have a great deal of experience but anyone who played against Martin knew he was a deep thinker about the game. It was certainly a risk but quite quickly we all knew we had an organised, dedicated and passionate manager with a good team around him and we had that next U21 team coming through as well.

The likes of Dermot, Peter, Larry and Michael, Mickey Graham and Anthony Forde, there was a raft of players, so it was a good time as well.

Anthony Forde: McHugh was a big figure. He was obviously one of the country’s best footballers for one thing. His enthusiasm for football – he was obsessive. And I think that probably rubbed off on a lot of us over the years in terms of how driven he was, how much he wanted to succeed, the measures he would go to to try to succeed and get the very best out of everybody.

That was definitely something that would have rubbed off on us over the years afterwards.

Martin McHugh: I drove down to Wicklow to watch Antrim play in Wicklow before the league started. I went down to watch Wexford… I had an obsession.

I wanted to watch football. And I went everywhere watching football. Now it’d be different, you’d probably have videos. Now, it’d be a lot better, but that time I would turn up at the games. I used to come down to a lot of games in Cavan. I would go to championship games and league games and everything.

I was young enough and hungry enough. I knew I had the right county behind me and I knew I had a good bunch of players.

Anthony Forde: He had that standing which meant a lot but that will only get you so far. When you come into a dressing-room, a manager will have a certain standing from what they have done in the game but they have to back it up with what they know about football, how they communicate, how they motivate, the structures they put in place for you to succeed. And there was nobody better at that time than McHugh, there’s no point saying otherwise.

Jason O’Reilly: At the time, I wouldn’t have had a clue to be honest. I didn’t pass any heed on it, I was young and trying to get a role with my own club starting off. In ’94 we were kind of coming good with the club, I was focusing on that and then somebody mentioned to me after the Junior Championship about going into the Cavan set-up. I had followed Cavan all over the place but playing with the county wasn’t on my radar at the time.

I went to the Ulster final in '95 with Mark Lawlor and he says ‘you should be out there’ and I kind of laughed and he says, ‘I’m deadly serious’. When Mark was serious, he was serious! I was in awe of those players, I suppose at that stage I didn’t believe I could do what they could do.

I was called in to the U21s then, I didn’t make the county minors. I wouldn’t have been that good at school and I think the fella who was over us was a schoolteacher.

Martin McHugh: I came down to the interview, I don’t remember if I did a second interview or not but I was offered the job. I went in and I met the county board and I always say to this day, the people on the county board gave me a standing ovation that night.

I had managed the club but I had no record at managing. I’ll never forget that. The Donegal people didn’t put trust in me and I’d played for so many years for them and I helped train the teams at times and everything else and Cavan put that trust in me.

So it was a very emotional time. I remember saying to my wife, Patrice, ‘this is just unbelievable, these boys don’t know what I’m like and they’re putting faith in me and trusting me’.

So I was glad in a way I could repay that. But I still, to this day, can’t believe it because I thought some of them would be saying, ‘how are we going to put faith in this fella?’

Because some of the Cavan players, they weren’t as old as me but they weren’t much younger than me.

Two years before that, we drew with Cavan in Breffni Park and probably should have been beaten that day. We went on to win the All-Ireland so that’s where Cavan were at.

I knew Cavan was a football-mad county, I knew that from playing against them.

Brendan Keaney sold the whole thing to me, what Cavan was about. He said they hadn’t won a championship game in seven years but you knew that didn’t make a lot of sense. Cavan were down close to the bottom of Division 3 at the time – for a footballing county like Cavan, it was a great time to take over them.

People are talking now about Derry and how good a time it was when Rory Gallagher took them over, because they are a great football county and there’s only one way they were going to go.

Cavan was nearly the same kind of a story, a GAA-mad county. It was an easy enough sell.

Philip Kermath: We realised quickly that McHugh was just on a different level, maybe we were a bit spoiled but I have never been in a set-up which was that well organised since. He was so meticulous.

All the best players in the county wanted to go in that time. He was brilliant.

In challenge matches or something, he could stand up at half-time and make observations on every play in the first half. ‘Philip, that ball should have gone there’ or whatever. Just a brilliant footballing mind.

He had a tongue that would clip a bush, he’d eat you! If you did something stupid you were told in no uncertain terms but by the end of it, you were built back up. He had a terrific way of building you back up again, the arm around the shoulder.

Damien O’Reilly: I think maybe if he had got the Donegal job, he mightn’t have came to Cavan.

Stephen King: He had been there, he was very influential in Donegal and he didn’t get the Donegal job and maybe that put fire in his belly for the Cavan job. He used his organisational skills to great effect and he got a great response from the players. It was a no-nonsense camp.

Martin McHugh: It probably did [drive him on], it would have to, I mean, I suppose people tell you I’m hurt to this day. You know, I always wondered if I had got the Donegal job where would it have gone or what I could have achieved. I might have ended up in my grave over the head of it. I might have ended up bankrupt or something because the passion I would have had for it...

I definitely wouldn’t have got the same support in Donegal as I got in Cavan because the Cavan county board were unbelievable.

You had Tom Boylan as treasurer, Gerry Soden was secretary and Brendan Keaney was very important. My first year was the first year that Kingspan came in as sponsors.

Brendan Keaney went to them and got Kingspan to sponsor us. He said, ‘look, this is the biggest company in Cavan, we want the biggest company sponsoring the Cavan football team’. Brendan Murtagh was brilliant.

The county board wouldn’t have had a lot of money, I remember we were looking for wet gear and I met Brendan Murtagh for dinner and he said ‘whatever you want, Martin, no bother, you just get it and tell O’Neill’s to send the bill to me’.

We had professional people, Joe Doonan, Declan Gartlan was the physio. Things were tight and Donal Keogan came on board and helped cover the expense for those people. That’s the kind of spirit that was there, people got behind the team.

I went to Sean Quinn, I met him at the house and he laughed, he said ‘you know I’m a Fermanagh man!’ I said ‘I know but you’ve all the business in Cavan, we just want to use the Slieve Russell to up the standard of the whole thing’.

I always remember his wife made tea and sandwiches and we sat there and had a great oul chat about football, it was brilliant, and he rowed in behind the whole thing as well. We got a lot of the right type of people on board for the whole thing.

The first week, I met Brendan Keaney and I said I need a good man with me, one good man who is going to look after everything, do everything, and make sure it’s done right. I said you think about it, I’ll leave it with you.

Keaney was a shrewd man, he was into politics and different things and he would know what was going on. He says to me the next time he met me, I have the man for you. Mickey ‘The Pound’ Reilly – but he says there’s only one problem with him.

I says ‘what’s that Brendan?’

‘He’s Fine Gael!’ he says.

I said ‘we’ll not worry about that, we’ll get over that!’ And Mickey was the greatest man ever I had by my side.

You have five or six people looking after gear and looking after everything now, Mickey did all that on his own that time. I rang him every day in the morning and he looked after everything. If that was the only problem we were alright! We were on to a good thing.

(Read part 2 here) - Cavan begin to start winning games and qualify for a first Ulster final in 12 years in 1995. But progress does not always go in a straight line.