Opinion: Cavan hit some high notes but tapered off in the end

Opinion

The Cavan senior team gave the supporters some terrific days in 2024 but ultimately struggled against the better sides. Once again, we don’t really know where they are at, writes PAUL FITZPATRICK.

So, a season that promised much tapered off. Was it a positive or a negative year for the Cavan senior footballers? That is not an easy riddle to solve. Bear with us.

The campaign started on an impressive note with an away win over Kildare which was seen as a decent scalp at the time (subsequent events definitely indicate otherwise) and Cavan followed up by beating Cork and Louth and losing by a point to Donegal.

The end of the league saw a slump; Cavan played poorly in drawing with Meath and were awful against Armagh and again versus a Fermanagh side scrapping to stay up.

Next up was Monaghan and it says a lot about where Cavan were coming from in recent seasons that Cavan went into that game as 2/1 underdogs against a side they’d beaten in the previous two meetings and who had lost six in a row in the league.

A very good performance produced a six-point win, the widest margin in the fixture in 52 years.

In hindsight, Tyrone in the Ulster quarter-final was a major missed opportunity. It was clear they were nowhere near the side they were in the recent past and Cavan would probably never have as good a chance to finally beat them.

The home side came close, losing by a point after extra time, but were undone ultimately by an abysmal first 40 minutes or so.

Still, there was grounds for optimism ahead of the All-Ireland SFC group stage, even after the shattering news that Paddy Lynch, who was in the form of his life and accounting for half of Cavan’s scores, was ruled out for the season.

But Cavan were insipid, flat and poorly set up in Castlebar, over-matched and out-gunned against Dublin and then undone by sheer sloppiness and a general lack of intensity in defence against Roscommon.

Damningly, at no stage in any of the Sam Maguire group games did Cavan lead, even for a minute.

It could be argued that losing Lynch was the turning point of the season and, for sure, Cavan were unlucky with injuries. Dara McVeety was laid up for the entire championship barring a cameo against Roscommon, in which he did well and scored a goal, and Killian Clarke played no championship football either.

For our money, those three are irreplaceable – and the panel was already lacking depth. When Cavan won Ulster in 2020, they only used 17 players in the final and quite a few of those – Ray Galligan himself, his fellow All-Star Thomas Galligan, Martin Reilly, Gearoid McKiernan, Niall Murray, Conor Smith et al – had either retired or opted out of the panel in the meantime. Their replacements have not been of the same quality and the result is that the squad is weaker. Remove quality players like Lynch, McVeety, Clarke, Conor Brady and so on and it’s almost threadbare.

Still, the tendency to collapse defensively is alarming and hard to fathom. In four of the first five rounds of the league, Cavan held the opposition to 0-12, 0-13, 0-16 and 0-11 and the Louth game in round four (where they leaked 3-9 while still winning) looked like the outlier.

As the season progressed, however, the opposite became the case. Shockingly, the 1-12 Cavan leaked in the win over Monaghan was the best defensive performance of the final seven games of the year. The other matches saw concessions of 2-21, 2-14, 1-23 (after extra time), 0-20, 5-17 and 3-20.

After three successive losses, the air had gone out of the tyres before the Roscommon match. It was notable that Galligan himself was central to the warm-up drills, very much present; he was clearly demanding and expecting a major effort to save the season but the performance was careless and the game was akin, as one former player correctly observed, to a pitch opening of old.

What does it all mean? Well, there’s an existential question – and there are always lots of those when Cavan exit the championship.

That’s just how it is here. We see ourselves as a football-mad county with massive support who, if things click, will be back competing any day now. We call for honest conversations, all the time living in a kind of dishonest world where we think because we have a great stadium and five All-Irelands in the black and white era that we are exceptional.

The truth is that Cavan are not in the top 12 teams in the country at present. The team is getting on – it’s 10 years since the great U21 sides were doing the business, back when Enda Kenny was Taoiseach and Rory McIlroy was winning Majors – and the underage conveyor belt has been stuttering since.

Galligan assembled a backroom team that looked, on paper, as strong as could be hoped for in a county of comparable standing.

James Burke coached Mayo to the 2020 All-Ireland final, Stephen O’Neill was one of the greatest Ulster footballers and coached Tyrone to the 2018 All-Ireland final. Damien Keaney is regarded as one of our best up and coming coaches; Eamonn Murray’s achievements in a different code were off the charts. Catherina McKiernan is one of Ireland’s greatest athletes, Ronan Flanagan one of the most respected footballer in the county in the last 20 years. Gary Rogers is said to be in high demand as a goalkeeping coach in elite soccer and Gaelic football in this country.

It all boded well - although not all of those listed had a deep involvement as it turned out - but the four successive championship losses have left a sour taste.

There is a wider issue: the farcical competition structure allows that – four losses in a row - to happen to teams now and the danger is that players will copy the supporters and just turn their backs on it altogether.

That would be very worrying. All that sustains most counties is the hope of the big scalp or the extended run, "one day different" as journalist Malachy Clerkin called it one time.

It could be argued strongly that more exposure to the good teams will help development for sure but it's also a painful and slow process and a lot of teams won’t have the stomach or the persistence to go at it again having seen first-hand the gap that exists.

Had Cavan’s season ended with the Tyrone loss, having finished third in Division 2, there would be a real buzz heading into 2025. For a team coming from three years in the backwaters of Divisions 3 and 4, it would be seen as a success.

But it didn’t – and, in truth, it isn’t. The difference is, Cavan’s limitations have been exposed and everyone can see now they are a long way off the best teams, and even the teams below the best. Other counties are in a similar position. Sometimes, less is more.

So where does that leave us? When Galligan came in as manager, he was asked about a rebuilding job and he rejected the very word. Cavan were “absolutely not” in transition.

In recent weeks, though, a change can be seen as he has talked about blooding young players. It’s likely that as the year has gone on, he has realised that the team needs strengthening, that some loyal servants may not have it any more and others who had potential have been shown to lack the requisite quality.

And yet, for all that – the injuries, the loss of form, the defensive frailties – the biggest factor of all is that the quality of opposition rose markedly.

Cavan played five Division 1 sides in the championship in 2024. From 2014 to 2023 inclusive, 10 seasons, they only played 10.

At that level, it’s tough. Some good wins on the road in the league saw them catapulted into third in Division 2; had they lost to Cork or Louth (who met in the preliminary quarter-final last weekend), for example, they could have found themselves in the Tailteann Cup and probably gone deep in that draw and the perception might be somewhat different.

Speaking of the Tailteann, those few years in it and the lower divisions aof the league hindered Cavan and contributed to the team not kicking on after making successive Ulster finals, and winning one, in 2019 and 2020.

By next April when the championship throws in again, there may only be half a dozen of the 2020 team on board. There are some promising rookies coming on but are there enough? Only an optimist would think so.

Galligan, our greatest ever goalkeeper, has carried himself impeccably as manager and is ambitious. He wants the team playing a certain way but the tail end of this season was chastening and the balance between defence and attack was badly skewed.

He will have learned a lot and learned it the hard way, too. The mood music is now gloomy; Cavan supporters are demanding, unrealistically so, and expectations will have to now be tempered.

The evidence of the three seasons from 2021 to 2023 inclusive paints a clear picture – there isn’t much there to suggest that Cavan’s rightful place is in the top 12 teams in Ireland so do the fans have a right to be disappointed in ‘only’ making the top 16?

But to take the opposite and perhaps equally valid view, would accepting heavy defeats and sloppy performances not be the ultimate manifestation of a loser mindset? Must more be demanded?

It’s a balancing act and Cavan haven’t managed it well, historically or recently.

So, to return to the question: on reflection, can you say definitively if it’s been a good year or a bad one? Do you take into account where the team has come from or do you place more weight on where you think they should be arriving?

It feels like a crossroads. Given the wild unpredictability we have seen from them in recent years, nobody can say with confidence what route this group will now take.

The wait, and the hope and the dread and everything else that comes with it, goes on.