Cavanman's Diary: An eventful football week

A friend of mine once interviewed the great Cavan footballer of the 1940s and ‘50s, Owen Roe McGovern. The conversation took place over the phone; Owen Roe was at his home in New Jersey, in his 90s at this stage but still sharp and convivial.

At one point, though, as the chat began to taper and the reporter mentioned the contemporary Cavan team (this was around 15 years ago, in Cavan football’s hellscape era), Owen Roe, becoming animated, decided that he would take his turn asking the questions.

“What’s wrong with them?!” he demanded. It instantly entered my friend’s lexicon; he breaks it out every now and then, in relation to whatever trivial passing matter he encounters.

I thought of that chat and the great Owen Roe last Sunday, when Cavan made a wrong-headed decision to cap off an eventful week.

Now, cliché tells us that a week is a long time in politics, and the same goes for football. Often, the two are intertwined but this column is on safer ground on the football beat; there, the path is just as winding and the inclines equally as steep and perilous.

So, to football we turn and in that world and first, it was announced that Cavan’s Games Development Manager, Dermot McCabe, is to take up the role of Westmeath senior team manager. Now, there is nothing wrong with counties sourcing managers from alternative suppliers – God knows, Cavan have had enough of them and even won an Ulster title in the hands of one.

Also, it goes without saying that anyone is entitled to manage whoever they like and it speaks to McCabe’s status that he is one of only a handful of Cavanmen to manage another county.

But, we often hear that inter-county management is a “results business”. You must identify the strengths and weakness of the opposition and plot their downfall - that’s the nature of the beast.

Westmeath will play against Cavan in the National League in what, in all probability, could be a campaign-defining fixture. The Cavan GDM, the finest footballer I have seen in the blue jersey, managing against his own county is not the best look for the county board.

Managing teams at that level is very time-consuming; at the launch of the GAA’s Interprovincial series last Monday, Dessie Dolan, who is the outgoing Westmeath manager so should know what he’s talking about, told the media that inter-county management takes up 40 hours per week.

That’s not the maximum figure – that’s, in Dolan’s words, “at the very least”, so McCabe will be a busy man.

Last Thursday, county board officers held a meeting at Kingspan Breffni where the matter was discussed. Some are understood to have expressed unease; others felt that this was a most positive development. Owen Roe’s words come to mind again.

Anyway, cut to Sunday and a Status Yellow wind warning was in place. The county had hummed with talk that the Senior Championship final could be postponed; it seemed the right thing to do, the only sensible option.

The county final is Cavan’s Mardi Gras, its World Cup showpiece, the game that stops a county. It matters.

So, with gusts of over 30mph forecast, conditions which, while technically not a danger to players or the public, are in no way conducive to the playing of Gaelic football, it seemed there was no decision to make. The game would be pulled, surely.

Beforehand, according to the Ramor United manager in his post-match interview, representatives of both competing clubs were canvassed and expressed the view that they would not object to the game being postponed. The county board would neither confirm nor deny this. One of the minor finalists also raised concerns.

Anyway, the games went ahead and the sight of one of the goalkeepers taking several attempts to place the ball on his kicking tee, of the goalposts swaying wildly, of kick-outs changing direction mid-flight, added an element of farce and besmirched the biggest occasion in local sport.

It is important to say that none of that is to detract from a fantastic Crosserlough team, who were worthy victors and carried their club’s famous colours with honour and sportsmanship.

They were the better team and it would have been wrong had they lost due to the goalposts bending out of shape and resulting in an accurate kick going wide or some such incident which was quite probable.

Why did Cavan not call this game off, as other counties in the region – Longford, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh to name a few – did? The finals in Meath and Louth did proceed but both venues are east of Cavan – the storm was blowing in from the Atlantic, with the westerly counties worst hit – and both threw in earlier, which is important as the wind was forecast to be at its strongest from 4pm on, the time that the most important and storied match in Cavan club football was scheduled to throw in.

Roscommon, to the west, went ahead, but at 2pm; again, before the worst of it. It seemed like an unfathomable decision, as was delaying the minor final by 15 minutes when the forecast clearly predicted worsening conditions.

The official line is that the board consulted with the Gardaí and were told there was no threat to health and safety. But conditions were hardly playable, regardless, and there has been an outcry since.

This column has, in the past, written about the notion of Breffni exceptionalism, comparing it to Trumpian politics. It’s a yearning for a bygone era, a sad humming of long-gone songs, songs that you maybe never really knew in the first place.

An example landed in my inbox on Monday when a lady from England that I do not know emailed me, out of the blue.

“This morning I was in conversation with some friends,” she wrote, “talking about Cavan and Kildare and one recalled his father teaching him and his brothers a song about the time Cavan won a football match against Kildare. He mentioned the phrase ‘men and ladies fair’ and expressed sadness that he could not remember the rest of the words.”

Mentioned in that song, the words of which I dug out in George Cartwright’s Breifne Abu, was the infamous ‘Tuam fiasco’ of 1934. Well, Sunday looked like another, 90 years on.

Exceptional, alright, is one word we could use.