Cavanagh: Things could get ugly

SEÁN CAVANAGH has warned that the 2012 football season could be ugly and believes the GAA will have to combat the growing physicality and defensiveness of the game when more teams follow the lead of sides like Dublin and Donegal.

“It’s gone to the stage where everything is about power, strength, conditioning,” he said. “Gaelic football now is essentially basketball, 12 men behind the ball and a couple up front. Positions mean very little and it is more important now to be a tackler than it is to be a scorer.

“Whether that takes a bit of the beauty of the flair out of the game that inside forwards have, probably. I’m sure the GAA will maybe look at it if it is an ugly season in terms of spectator sport. The GAA will need to take a look at it and see what way they can change it.

“At least in basketball there is a shot clock,” he only half joked. “The ball has to go at some stage. In GAA, the way some teams are playing, they will hold the ball for minutes, minutes and minutes nowhere near the goal.

“It doesn’t make it pretty but it’s unfortunately where the sport finds itself at. The template was put out last year by the Dublins and Donegals and teams like that.

“Every team will copy it this year, no doubt, and it’s going to be interesting to see how it will pan out.”

Cavanagh pointed to his Tyrone teammate Martin Penrose as an example of how Gaelic football has changed. The joke in their dressing room is that Penrose is the best tackler in Ireland — a nippy corner-forward who once thought of nothing but scoring goals.

Cavanagh’s Tyrone were once derided for their ‘puke football’ but the Moy man looks back on those days through a sepia-tinted lens.

“You could run in those days, there was room for it,” he said.

It isn’t just the games either that are changing.

Dublin have set new levels of preparation with their pre-dawn routines in St Clare’s, another about turn from Cavanagh’s early career, like in 2003 when Mickey Harte had them meeting up no more than once a week.

Now? Its every night between gym and training and it was whilst performing a maximum bench press with the Ireland International Rules squad late last year when he ruptured his pec major, a tendon that runs from the pectoral to the shoulder and the elbow.

Cavanagh tore it clean off the bone and pulled down his T-shirt yesterday to reveal a bright purple six-inch incision where the joint is attached with pins. The initial recovery took eight weeks and was as nasty as the injury itself.

“I’m 28, it was the first time I had done maximum bench press. I didn’t know what sort of level to go to. Danny Hughes was doing weights with myself and Ciarán McKeever. Danny hadn’t even started yet, he is some sort of a freak of nature when it comes to bench pressing. He was only starting at 120 [kgs], myself and Ciarán were starting at 80. It was a wee bit of bravado almost, ‘we’ll try and go as hard as we can here’. It snapped at 120, I heard the snap on my shoulder. It was a really freak injury, it was only diagnosed after two or three X-rays.”

Hard to believe but he was lucky.

Being on Ireland duty, he was given the best of care by Croke Park and he was operated on three days after the incident. Speed was crucial. Had there been a delay, the tendon would have retracted and his career was over.

“Any doctors I’ve seen they said they’ve rarely seen it happening.

“Alan Mullett over in Santry did the operation and he was involved in doing most of the rugby guy’s operations. He was saying that he has only ever seen it two or three times. He’s a specialist in shoulder injuries.”

Cavanagh is out in total for six months. A changing Tyrone team and another attempted assault on Sam await but is the appetite still there given all his misgivings about the modern game?

Not a problem. “I have to get out of changing nappies somehow.”