Golden generation can get Cavan back on top, says Carolan
ULSTER is often singled out as the most competitive provincial Championship in Gaelic football – if not Gaelic games outright – but the most successful county in the history of the tournament has been notably absent from the podium on Ulster final day for the last 20 years.
In the time since Cavan last claimed provincial honours back in 1997, only Down, Antrim and Fermanagh have failed to be crowned kings of Ulster.
This has been no gradual slide, and can be traced back to two Breffni bombshells – the ousting of manager Liam Austin in 1999, and the decision by his successor, Val Andrews, to walk away just hours after he was installed for a fourth term as boss in 2001.
They have not managed to reach a single Ulster final since Andrews left, but after years of disappointment there is a renewed sense of hope.
Now under the guidance of Mattie McGleenan, they will seek to get their Championship back on track against Offaly following a narrow defeat to Monaghan.
It could be a defining day for the Breffni’s young team, which contains a golden generation of players that claimed four successive Ulster Under 21 titles between 2011 and 2014.
Few are better placed to asses the current situation than Ronan Carolan, a selector for the U21s during that fruitful period and top scorer the day Cavan last tasted Ulster success, hitting six points against Derry to land the Anglo Celt Cup 20 years ago.
They were undone by eventual champions Kerry in the AllIreland semi-final that year, but in the days and weeks that followed Carolan could have never imagined that another barren era stretched out in front of the county.
‘You take your opportunities when they come and in 1997, the players would have felt that we should really have gone the whole way,’ he says.
‘It possibly was a lack of experience that cost us but we certainly felt that we were as good as the Kerry team that won it that year.
‘Most of that Cavan team had been beaten seven years in a row in the first round of the Ulster Championship against really good Donegal and Monaghan teams, so you were gone in May or early June from 1988-94, and you don’t develop if you’re gone in the first round of the Championship.
‘That team was made up of an (Ulster-winning) U21 team from 1988 which I would have been a member of along with seven or eight other lads. We would have been hitting 30, which was unfortunate, and really at that stage, even though the players from my era felt we had a few more years in us, the pity was that management became pretty disjointed.’
The man who led them to that Ulster title, Martin McHugh, quit that summer and was replaced by Austin, who stepped down in January 1999 after some squad members became unsettled under his leadership.
Val Andrews took the reins and endured a difficult first two seasons before bringing Cavan to within two points of Tyrone in the 2001 Ulster decider, but he shocked the county board when quitting the post despite being voted in for a fourth term, deeming the 40-24 result in favour as anything but a vote of confidence.
Managers came and went with little success, but now, under McGleenan, Carolan sees progress.
‘It was a really important appointment and I believe they got it right. Obviously it’s Mattie’s first time at that level, and I’m not involved at all, but from what I see he’s ambitious, progressive and intelligent.
‘It’s certainly a better panel of Cavan players than has been around for a number of generations.’
So, how do the current crop stack up against the side he was a part of in 1997?
‘I would say there’s probably a greater spread [of talent] now than there was then,’ he admits.
‘The problem with that [1988 U21] team was you had 10 years and then you had another glut [of players coming through], but now the glut has come in a four or five year period, so I think they have a greater opportunity to progress because I think where we failed was we only really got one bite at it.
‘Yes, we succeeded in winning an Ulster title but we weren’t around three or four years later to progress from that win, whereas with the present team, there will come a stage where Seán Cavanagh and players of that era are retiring in Ulster, and the body of the Cavan team will be made up of the successful U21 outfit and so will have been more successful that their peers from other counties.
‘I suppose the issue, as any Cavan person will say, is getting that elusive, brilliant forward – it’s a pity Seanie Johnston isn’t five years younger!
‘We’ll just wait and see. I’m certainly not feeling in any way negative about the future.’