Top marks for Cavan but these matches feel like a mock exam

Colour view

KEVIN EGAN cast a cold eye on the goings-on in Cusack Park, Mullingar on Sunday.

At the risk of sounding a little bit like Carrie Bradshaw, the main protagonist from the ‘Sex and the City’ TV show who made a strong case for being one of the most unlikeable characters ever to be written, we’re going to base this examination of Sunday’s league game in Mullingar around a forced and painful analogy. Maybe not as appalling as when she said “Maybe the fight between marrieds and singles is like the war in Northern Ireland”, and she managed to fleetingly unite nationalists and unionists in one moment of collective horror, but it’ll be shockingly strained nonetheless.

But, as the Canadian man screamed down the phone when a large grizzly bear broke into his kitchen looking for a few leftover fish fingers, bear with me…

Watching Cavan and Westmeath play out an utterly chaotic and unpredictable league game on Sunday afternoon felt a lot like the Leaving Cert mock exams.

Now it’s been a long time since your writer sat at a desk and faced down a pink or blue exam book, but the stand-out memory from that week in the distant past was of my geography teacher deciding that what was needed was a brutal approach to marking these exams, ostensibly to ‘scare’ everyone into hitting the books harder in advance of the real thing, a few months later.

Out of a class of 20-something (my memory isn’t that good), only three students were given a passing grade, and two of those marks were below 45%. Generalising a little, this got the desired response from most of the female students in the class, but backfired with the lads, who simply dismissed it as a farce of an exercise and instead put what little bit of focus we had onto the subjects where the mocks were a more accurate barometer.

While Division 2 of the Allianz League is the most significant and meaningful of the four tiers of competition due to the effect it has on who advances to the All-Ireland series and which counties are condemned to Tailteann Cup purgatory, it is still a mock exam, a trial run before the much more serious business of the Ulster Championship and the All-Ireland series.

The challenge for Cavan this week – and indeed for Gowna man and Westmeath manager Dermot McCabe – is to try and figure out if what we saw in TEG Cusack Park is a true reflection of what type of game we’re going to see in the provincial and All-Ireland series, or if it was a farcically exaggerated version of the real thing, where aspects such as dissent punishments, one/two/three men up confusion and of course two-point shooting all took on a disproportionate level of importance.

Did referee Derek O’Mahoney play the role of my old geography teacher, looking to shock the two teams into good behaviour? Perhaps, but it’s probably more accurate to say that if you didn’t get the answers right on your test paper, he wasn’t going to go looking up the workings to see if he could give some partial credit.

The bigger question is probably if the sport of Gaelic football hasn’t shown all the geographical sharpness of Christopher Columbus, who set out to find the East Indies and landed on the other side of the world entirely. (Sidenote, maybe that was the trick – to go so far wrong, you become famous).

Over the past two decades, many eulogies have been spoken for the dearly departed art of long kicking, and in a bid to cure the skill of the rigor mortis that was diagnosed, the two-point arc was prescribed by Dr Jim Gavin and his fellow necromancers in the FRC.

Lo and behold, a true sporting Frankenstein was born, one where 12-point half-time leads can be all but eradicated in the space of 10 minutes. The wind was always a factor in the game, but even the most ferocious of gales might have been described as a nine or 10-point wind. On Sunday, Westmeath’s dozen-wide lead was quickly eroded, while down the road in Salthill, Galway led by 0-17 to 0-1 at half-time and those who were present felt that the game was still there to be won for Donegal.

Spring storms will have subsided by the time Cavan pull into the car park at Healy Park in Omagh on April 13, but as the air warms up, the ball will travel that bit further too, and instead of teams filling their boots with two-pointers for 35 minutes, they instead might start to believe that they can pick them off at a consistent rate over the full 70.

The value of two-point kicks will increase the value of two-point kickers, and then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as players whose sharpest weapon is their ability to skin a corner back and bear down on goal could well be swapped out for those footballers whose explosiveness is more visible when boot meets ball.

Then, when the relative ease of hoisting one over from 40 metres out is stacked alongside the difficulty in getting in for a goal, the sport could be about to enter what will possibly be known as its ‘Darts Era’. Like the ould lads who hung out by the board in your local pub always said, it’ll be ‘trebles for show, doubles for dough’.

Of course, some of the old rules of engagement still apply. The wind dictated which team would find it much easier to score at any given time, but it wasn’t the reason why Westmeath had most of the ball in the first half, and why Cavan enjoyed way more possession after the break. Getting stuck into the war in the trenches remains crucial, and if there is ever a rule change that strips that out of our sport, it’s likely to prove very unpopular.

However, the new paradigm and the enforced mid to long-range restart means that when teams get momentum, breaking it is all but impossible.

It was only when Westmeath won a few kick-outs, in part because of their changed personnel around the middle, that they slowed Cavan’s gallop, and even then, it felt like they were beating back the tide. Or battling erosion, or perhaps trying to break up a patch of thick cumulonimbus with a hairdryer. You get the idea, even if my mock exam result would suggest I had no understanding of any of these things.

For now, in the absence of any level of certainty over how close this is to the type of football that we’re going to see later in the year, Cavan will at least take plenty of satisfaction from the accrual of two crucial league points. For those who live on either the Monaghan or Meath borders, the two local derby beatings, and the manner in which they were administered, won’t be forgotten too easily.

That said, as far as the league table is concerned, points count the same regardless of whether they are secured against the nearest and dearest, or counties with which there is no animosity and history.

More importantly, the manner in which both Louth and Westmeath were overcome would suggest that, while the supporters in places like Redhills and Shercock were traumatised by the Monaghan loss and Kingscourt folk won’t be able to leave their houses in any direction bar west for months, the players have responded in the right way and they’re well on the road to taking the grim spectre of relegation off the table.

Aside from that, what did we really learn from Sunday’s mock exam in Mullingar? Mostly, that failing that geography exam really did bother me, but that I was always going to be okay at English Paper One, given that I can fill up so much space with one shockingly bad simile!