Opinion: Passive defending cost Cavan

Analysis

A lack of intensity in defence was the key factor in this defeat, writes DAMIEN DONOHOE.

So, we’ve come to the end of the road after Roscommon beat us in a poorly attended All-Ireland senior championship game.  I can’t put my finger on why supporters didn’t travel to Longford in bigger numbers. It was a knock-out game so neither side was going to be holding anything back and from the moment the draw was made, this was always going to be the game both ourselves and Roscommon would have targeted.

Look at the factors which should have attracted a larger support. This was effectively a knock-out match against a team around our level, who admittedly have played exclusively Division 1 and 2 league football in the last ten seasons and had made the All-Ireland quarter finals less than 12 months ago. Supporters were essentially guaranteed to see more than 25 scores given the sides’ form coming into the match and it turned out to have much more scores than that.

All that aside, I think this was an entertaining game of football that we were right in until the final 10 minutes. Last week, in the preview on this page, I wrote, “For Cavan to win we will have to better our scoring average by three points to over 17 points in total.”

As it turned out, we scored 21 times which is the highest tally we’ve hit this year, we got a goal and could have had three more so from that point of view, it was successful.

All six of our starting forwards got on the scoreboard – in the first half, in fact - and we added 1-4 off the bench. Our conversion rate was above average as we took 32 shots resulting in a 66% tally which is our third highest of the year.

When compared to Roscommon’s 70%, bagging 3-20 from 33 shots last Saturday, it shows how fine the margins were.

We created one more goal chance than Roscommon but they took all of their chances while we missed three – and one of theirs wasn’t really a goal chance at all.

In terms of Cavan’s green-flag opportunities, Roscommon corner-back Robbie Dolan did brilliantly to deny Ryan Donohoe and James Smith maybe didn’t see Oisin Brady free in front of the goals when he kicked his point on the break. The final one was a clever pass by Cormac O’Reilly to Darragh Lovett who missed the target at top speed.

We hit our highest score of the year from open play with 1-16 and added an attacking mark on top. It’s fair to say that it was the best scoring performance of the year with 11 different scorers and three players getting three points or more.

Gerard Smith was in the form of his life on Saturday night, scoring with both feet for his five-point total. Cormac O’Reilly played his best game in a Cavan jersey with an outstanding four points while Darragh Lovett hit three in his 39 minutes on the field.

So, we can say that it wasn’t our attacking play that lost the game on Saturday.

Our kick-out retention was on the positive side, losing just five of the 31 taken, giving us an 84% completion rate. Roscommon did get some joy when they set up an aggressive zonal press and got two scores off our kick-outs.

On Roscommon’s kick-out, we never caused them a problem at all.

When we tried to press up in a man-to-man formation, referee David Gough spotted someone holding and awarded the free. The fact that we were unable to go to a zonal press hampered us on Saturday as Roscommon completed 27 of their 29 kick-outs.

It is something that’s been missing from our game. It might be high risk, but it is also high reward as Armagh showed on Sunday against Galway.

For all three All-Ireland group stage games, we have started with a different pairing in the middle of the field which indicates that the solution hasn’t yet been found. We have gone from a team full of big, tall men which gave us the option of forcing the opposition out long with kick-outs where we had a 50/50 chance at worst to now, where we are trying to remould half-backs and forwards into midfielders.

It was a game like Saturday where you appreciate how lucky we were to have the likes of Killian Clarke, Gearoid McKiernan and Thomas Galligan as ball-winners in recent seasons.

For me, the game was lost when Roscommon had the ball. Last week, I suggested we would need to reduce our concession average by three points to 16 points total.

We didn’t come anywhere close to that. We didn’t bring any real defensive intensity to defence in a game where that could have made a huge difference because Roscommon didn’t bring much either.

The Rossies scored all three of their frees awarded which says one of two things. We were very good in the tackle, or we were too passive when they had the ball in the scoring zone.

Unfortunately, the three attacking marks that they won and scored along with the 3-14 they landed from open play would suggest it was the latter.

Enda Smith caused all sorts of problems for us, with his direct powerful running leading to him scoring a goal and a point ,while also doing all the spade work for Brian Stack’s goal. Diarmuid Murtagh finished with 1-6 (2f) but just seemed to have as much time on the ball as he wanted.

We knew that Roscommon had a lot of firepower but four of their team contributing a cumulative four or more points to the team’s total isn’t good when you consider only two Dublin players managed that against us.

Our discipline let us down on a couple of occasions, with Murtagh’s point in the 17th minute from a throw-in that was initially a Cavan free a stand-out moment. The game was level at that point and we had won a turnover which afforded us one of fewer than a handful a chances to take the lead in the game. Instead, within two minutes we were down by three points.

When all is done and dusted, and someone has ascended the Hogan Stand steps to lift Sam Maguire we will be able to fully assess where we are in the order of things. Personally, I feel we’ll be able to look back on this year and say that with a team that is rapidly changing, we have made progress and will be able to enter the Division 2 league next season with the belief that we can be in the hunt for promotion.

Time will tell.