Labour of love: How stats archive preserves the past

Arthur Sullivan explains how he and a friend have collated Cavan stats from the past.

Between 2010 and 2016 I worked as a national GAA reporter, most of the time for the website GAA.ie. 

One of the most frustrating parts of the job was the difficulty in tracking down reliable statistics on players. When did they make their debut? How many games had they played? How much had they scored? 

Many people have not unreasonably assumed that somewhere in Croke Park, someone keeps a record of all this stuff in some labyrinthine archive off a corridor. 

They don’t. Most counties don’t either.

Players are generally the most reliable source when you require very specific details from something that happened in their career, but hardly any of them keep detailed records. They tend to be more focused on simply going out and playing, as they probably should be.

One thing I always thought curious in the job was that there were two counties whose record-keeping in terms of player statistics was far ahead of the rest – Kerry and Kilkenny.

They had detailed records for practically every player. And it wasn’t just the county boards who had the data. To take Kerry as an example, people like Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and the late Weeshie Fogarty had phenomenally detailed archives about who had worn the Green and Gold and what exactly they had achieved in it.

I wondered was it just a coincidence that the two most successful counties in football and hurling history seemed to place a higher value on the wearing of their county jersey than anyone else?

Cavan Calling
It was coming up to Christmas last year when myself and my friend Lochlann Egan from Castlerahan decided it was high time someone should collate the statistics for Cavan footballers over the years. Despite our county’s obvious passion for Gaelic football, there was a serious lack of data about those who had worn the jersey.

We had started to notice other counties marking the career milestones of their players – Ross Munnelly’s 100th game for Laois for example, or Sean McDermott’s 150th game for Roscommon – and we wondered about the Cavan players of our own age and how many games they had played. 

We could remember Cian Mackey making his senior Cavan debut as a minor against Meath back in 2005 but we had no idea how many games he had played since. He had no idea either. We knew Dermot McCabe and Jason O’Reilly had been brilliant players for Cavan, but just how brilliant?

It seemed like a worthwhile endeavour, even if a few family members did wonder about our sanity as we spent a good chunk of the Christmas holidays poring over tattered copies of ‘Breffni Blue’ and looking up McKenna Cup match reports from the 1990s.

The starting point we opted for was from the start of the 1993/1994 season (the league started at the end of the year back then) up until the present day. 

Since the start of the 1993/1994 season, the Cavan senior football team has played 345 competitive matches between All-Ireland Senior Championship, Ulster Senior Championship, National Football League and McKenna Cup. We figured that 345 matches was enough to be going on with, for now.

Watching all the games back was obviously not an option, so the only way to approach it was to go through every single match report for each season, gather up the teams and scorers from each game and then gradually tot them up, season by season, player by player, score by score.

We tried as much as possible to use two sources per game, so generally The Anglo-Celt match report plus a national newspaper match report, generally from the Irish Independent. 

The process was pretty time consuming - the 1994-2019 period was only very recently completed – and at times we did wonder if we had completely lost our minds.

But both Lochlann and I felt a strange kind of joy in seeing the final tallies of appearances and scores for various players finally materialising before our eyes after years of wondering. And now it’s all available to us at the click of a few buttons, from those who played hundreds of games to those who played just one or two. We hope to make it all available to everyone who is interested soon.

The biggest question we had before we started the process was: which player had played the most competitive games for Cavan since the start of the 1994 season? We speculated on several candidates and wondered if any of the veterans from the modern era would come close, players like Mark McKeever, Martin Reilly or Mackey.

Remarkable numbers
The player with the most appearances for Cavan since 1994 is Jason O’Reilly, who played 152 games for Cavan from 1996-2009. 

Jason is obviously remembered as a brilliant goalscorer – he is the only Cavan man to find the net in two Ulster finals since Charlie Gallagher did it more than 50 years ago – but we were still shocked when we saw the extent of his goal haul for Cavan during his career. 

He scored 48 goals in competitive games for Cavan. To put that in context, the next number on the goals list is 16, a tally jointly held by Dermot McCabe, Peter Reilly and Mickey Graham. 

Jason scored 12 championship goals and 28 league goals for Cavan. It would be intriguing to know if any player in Ireland can match this goal record for the same period. There can’t be too many.

Another player whose career arc warrants serious acclaim is Anthony Forde. Not too many players make their senior debut for their county in a provincial final, but Forde did, coming on as a substitute in the 1995 Ulster final loss to Tyrone. 

It was the first of 143 senior competitive appearances in blue, 87 of them coming in the National Football League and 36 coming in championship football. 

Forde and Reilly were part of a special cohort of players who broke on to the Cavan senior football team in the mid-1990s, along with Dermot McCabe, Mickey Graham, Peter Reilly and Larry Reilly. All of their Cavan senior records (see panel) make for impressive reading.

It was also remarkable to see some of the records of the current panel, particularly those of the two longest-serving players, Mackey and Martin Reilly. 

The Ulster final will be Reilly’s 132nd game for Cavan, drawing him level with Dermot McCabe. It will be Mackey’s 130th and his 44th Senior Championship appearance for Cavan. 

While we do not have confirmed records from before 1994, we are unaware if any Cavan man has played 44 championship games for Cavan. In the pre-Qualifier era, it would have been difficult to accomplish. By our 25-year records at least, McCabe (pictured) and Mackey are joint at the top in terms of championship appearances on 43 each.

Finishing the job
There are obvious deficiencies in the records. For starters, it’s obviously not very sustainable to simply finish at 1994. It leaves out iconic players like Stephen King, Ronan Carolan, Bernard Morris and countless others from the 1980s and 1990s from our lists, not to mention some of the legends of the 1960s and 1970s and the All-Ireland heroes of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

The further back we go, the more difficult it will be. For starters, the reports of matches are a little patchier from earlier eras. Then there’s also the question of what precisely constituted a “competitive” match back in the earlier days. Some people don’t regard the McKenna Cup as especially competitive nowadays, whereas tournament games and pitch openers, no longer very seriously regarded, were once considered fairly important occasions.

I’ve no doubt there are a few mistakes in the records that have been compiled. Scores can be mistakenly attributed to players in match reports, but by cross-checking across different sources, we hope this has been largely avoided.

The joy of remembering
The main thing we wanted to do was to start marking the milestones. Playing senior football for Cavan is a big deal and should be regarded as such. There’s nothing throwaway or casual about it. It deserves to be documented.

Playing 50 games or 100 games is a very big deal and it’s a shame that dozens of players have hit these milestones in recent years without it being marked in any way. Likewise, beating the appearance or scoring records of players who have gone before is not something which should be simply lost in time - to quote the line from the famous film - like tears in the rain.

There is a tendency to measure players by the amount of trophies they won and it’s a somewhat unfortunate one. The reality is that most players who play senior inter-county football aren’t going to win trophies, as much as they’d like to.

Yet for players who battled for Cavan in the good days and bad over the years, there’s surely a different kind of glory to be found in remembering it all. 

It’s obviously not something they’ll want to do in the middle of their careers – indeed, it might be seen as a little suspect if they did – but when it’s all over, they surely deserve a little recognition for the service they gave, regardless of the trophies that came with it.

The least we can do is to give them the data.

 

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS