CAVANAGH: WE NEED TO CHANGE
TYRONE sweeper Colm Cavanagh has insisted they won’t ‘tear up the script’ for the All-Ireland final but will have to devise a fresh plan to beat Dublin. Three-time All-Ireland-winning manager Mickey Harte is under pressure to tweak his counterattacking system for Sunday week’s decider. Tyrone have played Dublin twice in the last 12 months in the Championship, at Croke Park and in Omagh, and come up short on both occasions. ‘It’s probably a fair enough point in that we do have to do something different,’ said Cavanagh, the PwC GAA/GPA Player of the Month for August. ‘I’m assuming every manager before a game looks at the other team and says, “How are we going to stop this team?” and you have to adapt your style and players. ‘Any system of play, you can’t keep that style the whole time so, yeah, it’s probably a fair point that we have to do something different but I wouldn’t say tear up the script, I’d say change a wee bit to try to go at it.’
FROM the sidelines to the front lines, a lot has changed for Colm Cavanagh in the space of a decade with Tyrone. Back in 2008, the younger brother of Seán Cavanagh came on in the All-Ireland final against Kerry and kicked a late point.
‘The running joke in the team at the minute is that I was the last man to score in an All-Ireland final for Tyrone,’ said Cavanagh, who has since been converted into a specialist sweeper. ‘It’s a bit of a joke given the current position I’m in.’
It was an important score in a four-point win against a Kerry side chasing three All-Irelands in a row.
Yet if Cavanagh is entirely honest, he took it all for granted back then and recalls that on the morning of the final he played tennis with sub keeper Johnny Curran.
‘Everything was fly-by-night and take things for granted,’ he acknowledged.
Now, having recently turned 31, he is the fulcrum of Tyrone’s team and one of only two players still around from that landmark win over the Kingdom.
It probably says something about Tyrone these days that a player who operates deep in his own defence, and acts as a buffer against opposition attacks, is arguably their most important weapon.
Back in 2008, it was all about the quality of attackers like Seán Cavanagh, Stephen O’Neill and Owen Mulligan.
Without those marquee players, few are giving Tyrone much of a chance of dethroning Dublin on Sunday, especially with the champions being talked about in terms of winning a five-in-a-row in 2019.
‘Nobody is giving us a chance, we are heavy underdogs so as I said to the lads, there’s no need for any fear, we have to go out and have a go,’ said Cavanagh, the PwC GAA/GPA Player of the Month for August.
‘If we get beaten that’s fair enough but if we don’t have a go then that’s the worst-case scenario. Yes, we’ll have to change and adapt but we’ll have to play without fear also and really take it to Dublin and see where that takes us.’
Having lost to Dublin twice in the last year — heavily at Croke Park in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final and by three points in Omagh more recently — pundits have found it hard to make a case for Tyrone winning.
But Cavanagh reckons their display against Dublin in the Super 8s is evidence that they can live with the champions.
‘There was a lot read into that game last year in Croke Park where obviously we took a heavy defeat,’ said Cavanagh. ‘So it probably was good to get that game in in Omagh, albeit we lost. The game was definitely a lot closer and guys can take confidence from that, that we can live with this Dublin team and we can put in performances to rattle them.
‘There was a lot of talk after the Croke Park game last year. It probably wasn’t a good thing from our point of view in that it may have cast a few doubts in lads’ heads.’
Tyrone were thrown on to the back foot early on in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin when Con O’Callaghan scored a memorable solo goal. They chased the holders from there on and suffered a 12-point defeat.
Afterwards, even Colm’s older brother, retired star Seán, admitted that Dublin would probably go on to win the rest of the AllIrelands on offer this decade.
‘It was strange, that game in itself was just a shock to everybody’s system,’ said Colm. ‘We believe at the time we were prepared very well and we believed we could put in a performance to beat Dublin. But that went out the window in the first 15 or 20 minutes.
‘At that stage, I remember vaguely trying to push boys out, to try to really go for the game. We probably just sat back and accepted defeat a wee bit at the time.
‘It was probably frustrating from my point of view in that I saw early on in the game that it was moving away from us and we had to do something different.
‘But it’s very hard to change things on the pitch, no matter what you can do it’s very difficult to implement a change during a game. So yeah, it was just a frustrating time.’
Cavanagh also wanted to make clear that his high tackle on Brian Fenton that afternoon wasn’t a result of his frustration boiling over but merely an accident.
‘Genuinely, it was just the way I was going for the ball,’ he said. ‘It was just trying to influence the game a wee bit at that stage. That leg up was completely accidental, just to get that on the record.’