Graham hopes culture change can guard against mistakes of the past

Interview

It’s only with the passing of time that events can be put into their correct context. In years to come, Cavan’s recent Ulster Championship triumph will be recalled as fondly as any the county has secured but whether it will be viewed as a final destination or merely the first stop on a journey, we won’t be able to judge for a while yet.

Mickey Graham knows this better than anyone. The last two calendar years have been helter skelter. A mid-winter fairytale with Mullinalaghta catapulted him into the national sporting consciousness; another, this time with Cavan, has earned him a place on the shortlist of managers who have that priceless ability to break new ground. And that list is populated only by the very best.

As we write, 58 days have passed since what was, and we are aware that this sounds like hyperbole, a life-changing victory over Donegal for those involved.

By now, supporters are getting used to the idea and the sense from Graham himself, having become the first Cavanman to manage any team to a senior inter-county provincial title since Mick Higgins in 1969, is that he and the players have now firmly parked it.

That’s crucial. Graham’s outlook on the game was forged as a young man, in his early 20s, who picked up Ulster U21 and senior medals in successive seasons and probably felt the future was his and his teammates’ to shape as they saw fit. But it didn’t work out like that.

The group he came up with, which also included the likes of current selector Dermot McCabe, Peter and Larry Reilly, Anthony Forde, Jason O’Reilly and Terry Farrelly among several others, boasted a once-in-a-generation level of talent and having made the breakthrough early, anything was possible. That they never got to experience those highs again must surely haunt some of them when they look back.

“Back then, a number of players stepped away, the management stepped down too. When the new manager, Liam Austin, came in, it was always going to be hard to live up to the expectations but we still had the players to push on and do something at the time,” Graham recalled this week.

“But it came down to a number of things. The players felt that we weren’t doing the same work that we should have been doing. And then we probably questioned the management team at the time.

“We felt that we could have pushed on and won an Ulster Championship in ’98 but if the players asked, did we do everything we could have done to win it, the answer would have been no. Did the management do everything? Probably no, too. We have to take collective responsibility for that.

“There were a number of years where we felt we could have got something after ’97 and for various reasons, we didn’t. The age profile of the team at the time was quite good but we just didn’t push on. Were we happy with one Ulster Championship? Some might have been happy and others weren’t happy.

“So it’s about making sure that we try and build on this now and we don’t let this opportunity go by. We have to keep striving to improve and to move Cavan football forward because the big thing that probably has been missing in Cavan football for so long is that we haven’t, year in, year out, been consistently competing at the highest level and that’s what we have to strive towards.

“We have had these yo-yo years, up and down. But we want to get to a place where we can consistently say, every year, that Cavan are going to be competitive.”

That Graham and McCabe lived through it back then, the heady aftermath of a famine-ending win, is a decided advantage to Cavan now as they seek to kick on. His message is clear: serious footballers should not be happy with one great year. If nothing else, their talent demands as much.

Graham speaks at length of how the culture around the Cavan squad has now changed. An example? When he first took over, he identified players opting out of the squad as a persistent problem which had dogged Cavan. Of late, he has actually been fielding phone calls from players asking for a trial.

“Nobody has stepped away from the panel as of now, everybody is mad keen to push on. Like everything else, you try to keep evolving and keep improving and we will look to add new faces to the squad because we feel that adds a freshness, keeps lads on their toes, it raises the standard, keeps lads focused, willing to learn and not rest on their laurels.

“Nobody has stepped away which is a great sign. It’s actually been the opposite, a number of lads have put their hand up and said ‘can we get the opportunity to play for Cavan?’ and that hasn’t happened in a long, long time.

“It just shows you what that Ulster Championship win last year has done, it has inspired lads to play for Cavan again and that’s what you want. I said it after the game, if this inspires the next generation of Cavan footballers, this has been more than just an Ulster Championship success, it’s been a huge success all over in getting lads to really want to play for Cavan.

“I believe that’s a bigger success than actually winning an Ulster Championship.”

Conor Madden recently spoke about how the short run-in to the 2021 season suits a Cavan side who are high on confidence and have momentum on their side. Graham can see in them that their self-belief has soared but, he says, the same drive must be there to complement it or there will be no improvement.

“The response since Christmas from the squad in general has been excellent. The lads have tasted success now, they know the level they can get to but they want to push on and keep learning and keep improving. There’s a lot of competition within the squad at the moment, we are looking to bring new faces in because we think that keeps the level of competition high in the squad and keeps players focused on where we need to go.

“We need to keep learning, keep improving and keep striving. We can’t be happy with just winning an Ulster title here, we’re looking to get consistency in our performances.

“The one thing we said as a management team when we took over was we want to leave Cavan in a position where we are consistently performing at the highest level on a regular basis, not just one year on, a few years off and come back again.

“That’s what we’re striving to do, can we be competitive on a consistent basis and not just have this be a once-off.”

Cavan were ahead of the curve last year before the lockdown. With so many of the squad based outside of the county, they had to train smart as well as hard. Players were sent off with individual programmes and the onus was on them to be in the best possible condition when collective training resumed.

When it did, the management were astonished at the shape the shape the players were in. That was the day Graham knew, he says, that things were different now.

“The lads have their work to do individually and the one thing that we learned out of the first lockdown was that the lads did the work that was asked of them. There was great trust within the group and as a management team, when the lads came back in, we couldn’t get over the conditioning of them. So that was the first sign that said to me that the mindset of Cavan footballers had changed, that they didn’t come back in [in poor condition] and we didn’t have to waste four or five weeks getting them fit.

“The lads came in ready to train, they hit the ground running. Obviously we had a few issues with injuries and Covid and all that sort of stuff but the condition the boys came back in was a credit to them and that was a sign to us as a management team that these boys were serious about what they were at.

“There’s great trust within the squad now, there’s great camaraderie because everybody knows that everybody is doing the work.

“When we first came in, we would have seen that lads were arriving to training and it was taking us two months, three months to get them fit. Whereas now we have lads arriving to training ready to train because they have done the work in their own time away from it.

“When they came back, they were ready to train and we could concentrate on the more important stuff than trying to get lads fit. That mindset has changed now and I have no doubt that when Cavan get together again, lads will come back fit and ready to hit the ground running.

“That’s the way we were approaching it even before lockdown. We have criteria that every fella that comes into the squad has to be at a certain level.”

Having lived it, he knows what the dark days were like. Players coming back a stone overweight, wasting a month while they shed the excess pounds, the necessary torturous training burning them out and shortening careers, too.

“The mindset in Cavan football for the last flipping 23 years had been that after club football, we down tools and do absolutely nothing from August or September till the county starts again,” he says, animatedly.

“All the good work that you’ve done the previous 12 months is undone so you were basically starting from scratch again.

“Some lads continued it on and other lads didn’t so there was no real accountability for development or improvement. Now, we look at where they are at coming near the end of our season and we say ‘when you come back to us, this is where you need to be at’ but another level or two up. It means that they can’t go backwards, it’s always looking to be better at what they’re doing.

“We saw that happening before lockdown. Last year when they came back in November, we could start back pre-season training a week or two later because we knew the lads were doing the work. When they came back into us, they all had targets and 99pc of them hit them.

“It meant that when they came back into us, we could concentrate on a bit more coaching, more tactics or whatever it is. Basically more football.”

“More football” paid off. While the team excelled, it was clear that so many individual players had taken their own games to a new level. That has been recognised with seven players picking up All-Star nominations, although Graham preaches again about the collective.

“Any day you get seven nominations is brilliant, I think back in ’97 there were only six nominations. It’s great to get that acknowledgement but the lads themselves would be the first to tell you that if it wasn’t for the rest of the squad, they wouldn’t be in this position of being nominated for an All-Star.

“While they have been nominated, a few other players could possibly be nominated as well but the reason they were nominated is because they had such a great team around them. The other lads really got the best out of them and pushed them on to perform at the highest level that they could.

“But it’s great, it’s great to get that recognition and in the year that’s in it as well. There are a lot of unsung heroes on every team, they roll up their sleeves and go about their business with no major fuss and they’re just as important as the lads who get awards and nominations as well.”

For 2021, there will be changes. While goalkeeping coach Darragh McCarthy is the only member of the group who has moved on, new people will join. It has to be a constant evolution.

“We will look at freshening up the backroom team, whether it’s an extra analysis man, the psychology end of things, coaching. We will look to freshen up the back room team with a body here or there.

“Because it’s a short window, it might be difficult for someone to come in and have a big influence in a short space of time so we have to be careful with that too, that we’re not just doing something for the sake of it either.

“But the main thing is that we just keep striving for improvement. That’s all we are looking for now.”

So far, so good.