Milestone birthday induces football nostalgia

Cavanman's Diary

There was a big job on, heavy plant employed. Me, my nailbar and I.

I had been handed the tool and, with it, a task: “Lift that floor”. Nothing could go wrong, I was told – just rip it and skip it. “Even you can do that,” someone said, the insult presumably – but not definitely – unintentional.

So that’s what I did. Some of the boards I prised up gently with a Zidanesque first touch, more of them required a liberal dose of ignorance. One broke and flew perilously close to my head (“It’s a wonder it missed because it’s the biggest part of you”, my unsympathetic uncle said, expletives redacted).

But I had tunes on the radio and I was enjoying the work. On the rare occasion I engage in manual labour, I always get a kick out of it (and talk about it ad nauseum). It brings me back to my teenage years in a tyre plant, every Saturday during school, then six days a week in the summer, trying to look busy (which can be harder than actually being busy).

It was hard work, though. Lobbing lorry-loads of tyres up into a loft to be sorted and stacked; holding wheels in one hand while screwing in nuts. Jacking, squatting, lifting; it was the sort of routine many poor suckers pay to do in the gym these days. Or so I’m told.

Anyway, there I was, snapping laths and stacking planks, my mind drifting back to my formative years, that first part-time job. Paid on a Saturday evening, cash in an envelope, and out that night to the Springs or the Kilmore (if you got in – the hated bouncers tended to indiscriminately select one tipsy 16-year-old from a group of them and send him on the lonely walk of shame back to Flood’s bus).

And then, football on the Sunday. If you were playing, you’d probably - but, again, not definitely - stay in. But if Cavan were playing, it was like Mardi Gras for lads and lassies my age. Everyone went – to the game and out after. The match, the night out, they were all the one.

And Cavan had a good team around then as it happened; the late 1990s, the after-glow of ’97. The county was football mad – there were still a lot of older people around who had lived through the halcyon days of the 1930s through to the early 1950s and the success of the 1960s was very fresh in the memory at the time - as fresh as the ’90s is now, if you can believe it. And here I am writing about it as if it was yesterday.

But it’s not yesterday. Now, make sure you’re sitting down for the next line: Last week, I turned 40 (if you feel queasy or light-headed, don’t worry, it’s only shock and will wear off).

How that happened, I’m not exactly sure. It feels almost careless; it seems like my 30th birthday was about two years ago.

But anyway - this big four-oh was coming up and here I was, getting nostalgic in the kitchen. And it was all because of Larry Reilly.

Why Larry? Well, you see, I had been half-thinking, when tearing up this wooden floor, that I’d come across some mouldy dead rodents or other creepy crawlies or maybe that I’d find some priceless treasure. Little did I know that I’d unearth a precious relic.

It was a sticker, about two or three inches squared, maybe twice the size of a postage stamp, clearly from some child’s collectors’ book. I thought, at first, it was rubbish, a wrapper or some such, but what caught my eye, under the rubble, was a Cavan crest in the top right corner. I swooped instantly, like a magpie, and retrieved it.

And on the sticker, which was unpeeled, was Larry Reilly, that mercurial Cavan footballer who was in his pomp back in the days I mentioned, when 40 seemed ancient, unthinkable. I dropped my nailbar and it clanged on the joists with a dramatic flourish.

I pawed the picture, tried to guess the year, and suddenly, I was 17 again, it was the summer of 2001 and everything was changing. I’d done the Leaving Cert; I was a man of means now that I had my summer job. Dublin was calling and the shackles of childhood were loosening by the day.

Cavan made the Ulster final that summer. In my mind’s eye, I was back at the Monaghan game, the semi-final, Dermot McCabe lording the middle. That was a big one around us, to beat Monaghan, to earn the bragging rights. We stopped in Connolly’s of Scotshouse on the way home to rub it in. Big men were we, drinking a pint and all.

By now, I was a teenager again. I swear I could smell tyre-dust in my nostrils and taste the alco-pops and hear the spit of the burgers on the hot plates in Clones. I remember it all; I even remember the jokes we told that day, trying to out-do each other. Some of us are still telling them.

Larry himself hadn’t his best game against Monaghan but he was a player I adored. When he got a defender on the back foot, it was a sight to behold – he’d turn left when the defender turned right and then, the opposite. A cat always plays with its prey before despatching it and this cat could purr – and he had claws, too. He was magic, thrilling to watch.

“Skin him, Larry!” someone on the terraces would shout. And he would – and sometimes, just when you thought he’d lost the ball, he’d fling it over the bar and jog back into position, the crowd on their feet.

How could a young fella not be in thrall to football when there was a player like that on your team?

The morning after that game, I thumbed into Cavan for work (this was the dying days of the tradition of hitch-hiking) and, that evening, we played a minor match against Cavan Gaels’ second string – it may have been a semi-final.

I’m not exaggerating when I say they beat us by at least 30 points but the sting of that faded quickly because we had an Ulster final to look forward to.

Cavan would lose that game to Tyrone as it turned out. I recall I got sunburned at it; the next day, I was going to a Debs. When we pulled up at the house, my date thought I was embarrassed.

I’m pretty sure that was the day - or maybe I have my matches mixed up from that glorious summer. Who knows – I am 40 now after all. It’s a lifetime ago, more.

After about five minutes in a daze, whatever was said on the radio – something about some wretched politician, some grown-up nonsense - caught my attention and I snapped out of the daydream. Real life resumed.

Back then, Val Andrews, 40-something I suppose but greying, was the Cavan manager. Val seemed a million years older than I was. Now, here we are in 2024; for the first time, the Cavan team manager is younger than me.

I got back to my work. No time for idle reminiscing; big job on and all that. The years go by and the truth is, there’s no point being melancholy about it, even though football tends to bring out the nostalgic side in all followers and especially dreamers like me.

But it’s only natural, I suppose, when you hit a milestone birthday, to reflect on days long gone. Innocent days when we were kids meeting the world for the first time, following the team, making our way.

Happy as Larry.