MOSTLY FOOTBALL: Game management let Cavan down against Clare

Cavan were heavy-legged at times here but crucially, Clare out-smarted them, writes Michael Hannon.

Watching the opening ten minutes of last Sunday’s game between Cavan and Clare I couldn’t help but think of that term that sometimes gets thrown around by pundits and commentators. I’m talking about “game management”.
It can mean multiple things to multiple people because it is, essentially, a multi-faceted idea. Watching Cavan play out the first half yesterday in Kingspan Breffni, I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone on the field was thinking their way through that opening 35 minutes of play in terms of the overall context of the game.
Cavan started extremely well; the work-rate from the team was impressive. They were 0-2 to 0-1 up playing against a very strong breeze.
What really impressed me though was the way the team were tackling and forcing turnovers. They had won more than double the turnovers that Clare had by the ten minute mark in the game.
In fact I was so impressed with the manner in which they started the game I knew it wasn’t something they were gong to sustain. Straight away, I felt how they were going to approach that period of play, when their intensity levels dropped, was going to be key.
This was Cavan’s third game on the trot and only Clare's second, something I wrote about in my column three weeks ago when Cavan's game against Laois was postponed.
But back to the opening ten minutes; those turnovers won meant that Mickey Graham’s men had close to double the possession that Clare enjoyed over that opening period.
Cavan, however, facing into a strong breeze, were forced to run a lot of that possession up the field and with the team looking to play the game at as quick a pace as possible, I was fearing they were going to hit a proverbial wall.
And over the next ten minutes they did just that. Rugby people often talk of missed tackles but Cavan would allow men to slip by on the defensive end on a number of occasions that led to overlaps and goal opportunities for the Banner, one of which was superbly taken by Joe McGann, one which was brilliantly saved by goalkeeper Raymond Galligan.
The effort in the opening ten minutes from Graham's men was huge but they resembled a punch drunk boxer for the next ten minutes of the half.
The rate at which the team turned over the ball increased greatly as they looked to respond to the setback of the goal they conceded. But those turnovers were lazy - Clare weren’t forced to work hard for them. Some, in fact, were simply handed to them.
Players burrowed lone paths through numerous saffron jerseys expecting but getting no sympathy from the referee.
And the more Cavan chased things, the more they looked vulnerable, not just on counter-attacks, but also in general play as fatigue crept into their game both with and without the ball.
Clare looked to press on the Cavan kick-out and Raymond Galligan took every restart as quickly as he could to prevent them from getting any success with this tactic.
This, however, left the Cavan team and the defenders in particular with the task of having to run the ball the length of the field on every single kick-out against a breeze.
Clare flooded the middle third of the field and thus took away the option of kicking it in, or through, that sector, and so the ball was run through that area predominantly by the defenders and midfielders.
By the time they had the ball worked up the field they were too fatigued to contribute to the attack. How many times did we see defenders breaking through in the first half to support the half-forward line, or even the full-forward line?
Clare hit Cavan for 1-3 without reply over the course of that 10-minute period when what Cavan really needed to do was take the sting out of the game.
Instead of chasing the game, they should’ve played keep ball for a few minutes. Catch their breath and slow things down a bit.
Instead we had turnovers happening when players forced kick-passes and hand-passes through a mass of bodies. The situation contrasted greatly with arguably one of the best examples of game management I’ve seen in Kingspan Breffni, when Cavan U21s defeated Tyrone in the Ulster Championship in 2014.
That day the U21 team played into a hurricane in the opening half and spent much of that period playing keep-ball, holding on to possession for two and three minutes at a time, essentially running down the clock on Tyrone who failed to get their hands on the ball and thus failed to capitalise on the breeze that blew at their backs.

Second half charge
The six-point deficit that Cavan had to make up at half-time on Sunday looked daunting but not insurmountable and they had the best possible start to the second half when they rattled off five points on the trot with a couple of wides thrown in that should really have seen them draw level or edge in front of the Banner.
Somewhere near the end of that run a Clare defender fell to the ground clutching his head with no one around him and the referee had to hold up the game for two minutes while he received treatment.
Everyone in the ground knew what was going on. Now this, right here, was game management. This was someone trying to take the sting out of the game.
Cavan subsequently never got level and Clare played some very good counter-attacking football in the second half and you couldn’t really argue that they didn’t just about deserve their two-point victory in the end. It is a result that has completely thrown wide open the group at both ends of the table.
Cavan need to get three points from their final two games against Kildare and Roscommon if they are to go up. To do so, they’re going to have to show a bit more development to their game.
Taking last Sunday's game as an example, if they could work on a defensive system to implement after they turn over the ball then it would alleviate some of the issues they’re having at the minute as Westmeath and Clare so far this year have shown the Breffni men to be vulnerable to counter-attacks when forced into transitional defence.
Even better, stop turning over the ball and you don’t have to worry about being caught out on the counter. On Sunday, they were good in the second half but poor in the first when attacking the Clare kick-out.
Even allowing for the breeze, there shouldn’t be such a startling difference in the outcomes of that one facet of the game in either half.
If they can squeeze even a few per cent improvement out of these things in their final two fixtures, then they will give themselves a very good chance of going up.

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