Mickey the magician conjures another miracle
Graham’s class grounded in an underdog spirit
LONG before he put on the bainisteoir’s bib Mickey Graham exemplified the mantra: brain trumps brawn. Packaged inside a 5ft 8in frame, he was deemed by many to be too small for the inter-county game. After struggling for game-time when he joined the panel in 1995, it was another man short in stature and high on brain power that persuaded him to stay on.
Martin McHugh told him that he would have role on a team going somewhere big.
Two years later, he came off the bench against Derry as Cavan won their first Ulster title in 28 years.
Last Sunday, Graham not only succeeded McHugh in taking Cavan back to the top of the pile, but also stopped Ryan McHugh, his former manager’ s son, becoming part of the first Donegal team to win three Ulster titles in a row.
It meant that Graham and his assistant Declan McCabe are the only Cavan men to have been directly involved in the county’s two Anglo Celt Cup triumphs over the last half century.
And f or the 45year- old, this was truly a generation in the making.
Beyond the mask of roguery he likes to wear, no one has ever doubted he is a football obsessive.
He was still at the peak of his playing powers when he was employed as one of Cavan’s first full-time coaches.
He subsequently departed that role and chose a career as a sales rep instead. He is currently employed by Coca Cola. But his desire to improve players and teams has been constant.
He was still a Cavan Gaels player when he managed Butlersbridge to an Ulster junior title in 2004, while he took his Cavan neighbours Drumalee to an intermediate title two years later.
But while he has always been a manger for hire, place, parish and family has always mattered.
He refused to manage any senior club in Cavan while his bothers Andrew and Paul were still playing with Cavan Gaels — the latter was part of the Cavan panel last Sunday, ensuring that he now has the full set of Ulster medals, minor, under 21 and senior.
That decision may have helped him along the road to Longford and Mullinalaghta where he charmed the GAA nation.
A half-parish of 400 people, they had not won a county title in 66 years before he arrived and by the time he left, they had won three in a row and were kings of Leinster.
Their 2018 victory over Dublin super club Kilmacud Crokes was too big to be contained in the back pages.
Such were the waves created by that result, they found themselves worthy of an appearance on The Late Late Show — normally not a platform to hail Leinster club champions.
‘Letters, postcards, cards coming from everywhere — America, England, Kerry, Cork, everywhere. You were getting people writing to you telling you how much you inspired them, how small their club was and how little they had to work with but how they could see something to aim at in Mullinalaghta,’ reflected Graham afterwards.
It was a sporting miracle that could never happen again… and then came last Sunday.
Where to start? January this year would be as good as any, when he felt obliged to make a public apology to the ‘people of Cavan’ for his team’s abject performance in losing by 13 points to Armagh.
He lost two of his top players — Dara McVeety and Conor Moynagh — in the close season, got relegated to Division 3 post lockdown and spent most of the winter digging themselves out of holes. They trailed Monaghan and Down by an aggregate of 17 points and yet kept winning.
How did he do it? There is a theory that he is a lucky manager — their win over Down would not have happened but for an erroneously awarded penalty — but like the best, he makes his own luck.
Thomas Galligan has been a revelation this winter and is in the All- Star f rame but was believed to be on the brink of being cut from the Cavan squad at the start of the year, and that fright might just have helped drive him to a career- defining season.
Tactically Graham has been on the ball, shaping his team for Donegal by putting the emphasis on size so they could aggressively go after them last Sunday.
In a football world where big teams like Kerry, Cork and Monaghan all f altered because of caution, he sent his team out to play.
‘Why play football if you are not going to have a go.
‘Why sit back and be happy with moral victories. You play football to win,’ he insisted last Sunday evening.
The source of Cavan’s triumph, it could be argued, can be traced back 12 years.
In 2008, his Cavan minors lost to a Tyrone team that would go on to win the All- Ireland by a single point.
That cohort of youngsters would be the source of a golden period at underage level for Cavan as the Breffni men would go on to win the Ulster under-21 title in 2011, the first of four in a row.
And what was even more remarkable about last Sunday’s triumph, despite the absence of underage success, 10 of Mickey Graham’s match-day panel were under the age of 22.
Building big out of little, he may not be done with the miracles just yet.