Deflated Cavan need big display to get revival back on course

NICHOLAS WALSH didn’t think things could get much worse that day as he was ferried out of Breffni Park in an ambulance with a broken bone in his leg.

With 15 minutes to go, the strapping midfielder had collided with one of his team-mates. An innocuous enough incident, but one that still left him with a broken tibia at the bottom of his ankle.

Walsh couldn’t have described the damage with such medical precision at the time, but he knew he was in serious trouble. What he wasn’t prepared for was the news he received when he arrived at the hospital some time later.

Cavan had lost their game to Waterford.

The league threw up a handful of eyebrow-arching results, like Monaghan’s raid on Dublin in Parnell Park, Kildare’s win in Crossmaglen and even Dublin’s own success in Omagh.

No-one had seen Waterford’s curveball coming though, not least Cavan.

Cavan lined out that day knowing all they had to do was defeat a side ranked almost last amongst Ireland’s 32 football counties in order to finish second behind Louth and secure promotion back to Division One of the league.

Instead, their two-point defeat to the Déise left the door open for Westmeath to slip by them, an opportunity Tomas Ó Flatharta’s side grasped eagerly.

Predictably, it wasn’t long before the inquest began in Cavan. The verdict outside the camp was that the Ulster side had simply underestimated their unfancied opponents, a view put forward on the basis of the skeleton crew Martin McElkennon employed on the day.

“A lot of people said the goalkeeper didn’t play, but he had an injury so he wasn’t allowed to play. We had a few injuries on top of that and Dermot McCabe was also sick and couldn’t play,” Walsh said.

“There were a few things like that. It was just one of those freak days. There were scores against the wind being kicked from outside the 45 with the outside of the right foot and stuff like that.”

Despite their protestations, the air of complacency over the fixture was evident from the match programme, with one article comparing the highly unlikely possibility of a Cavan defeat to the sinking of the Titanic.

Waterford manager Jim Kiely saw the offending remark and made sure his players did too. “Fair dues to Waterford,” says Walsh. “They travelled up in cars, ate Mars Bars and drank Coke and, in a way, we might have underestimated them when we saw all this. They did what they had to do and we didn’t take the opportunity when we had the chance.”

Even the defeat of their old rivals and neighbours Meath in a challenge match a week later couldn’t disguise the hole Waterford had punctured in their best laid plans with just a handful of weeks to their opening championship appointment against Down tomorrow.

Cavan’s last Ulster title was won back in 1997 and the county has blown more cold than hot since. Playing in the top flight of the league next season was seen as a crucial staging post in reasserting their status in Ulster and catapulting them with confidence into the summer campaign.

Instead, they face the Mourne county as rank outsiders, bedevilled by injuries, devoid of momentum and with a sceptical following hoping for the best but fearing the worst.

“Obviously our goal this year was to get into Division One and it didn’t happen so we have to turn over the page and keep on going. You could say (the Waterford game) was a wake-up call and hopefully we can get sorted now and get the better of Down.”

There was a time when the meeting of Cavan and Down was the game in Ulster. The two counties have met in 11 Ulster finals with an astonishing seven of those falling into the nine-year period between 1962 and 1969.

The last time they met in a head-to-head for the title was back in 1978, though, and tomorrow they play for smaller stakes; the right to play Donegal in a provincial quarter-final.

Aside from Walsh, Cavan will field a team devoid of pillars like full-back Darren Rabbitte, centre-half and captain Anthony Forde and centre-forward Michael Lyng who, more than anybody, makes the Breffni machine tick smoothly.

“It is a massive challenge,” Walsh accepts. “We have a lot of injuries and we’re going to be massive underdogs going into it. No-one in Ulster will give us a chance. We know in Cavan that we have to keep positive. We beat them (after a replay) two years ago and we know we have to beat them now. That’s it. Bottom line. We only had a couple of weeks to prepare for Down so we had to stay positive and hopefully we can beat them.”

DOWN: B McVeigh, M Cole, B Grant, D McCartan, P Murphy, J Clarke, D Rafferty, A Molloy, D Gordon, E McCartan, A Rogers, D Hughes, L Doyle, B Coulter, M Walsh.