I’ll do what it takes to win, says unfazed Cavanagh

Seán Cavanagh has shrugged off Joe Brolly’s rant in the wake of Tyrone’s All-Ireland quarter-final defeat of Monaghan on Saturday.

The Derryman railed against Cavanagh’s blatant drag down of Conor McManus as the Monaghan forward was through on goal midway in the second half.

Brolly insisted Tyrone had “achieved something rotten” by succeeding in such a manner and declared that he could “forget about Seán Cavanagh as far as he is a man” after the lunge which prevented a near-certain goal.

“It doesn’t worry me one bit,” Cavanagh said. “I play for Tyrone, I play for the team. I’ll do whatever it takes to win. Unfortunately it’s not pretty at times but sometimes you have to take these yellow cards. I completely see where all the pundits are coming from. I would love to play a game of football that is completely free-flowing because that suits my game down to the ground.

“I’ve never got sent off for club or county in my life. I would love to see it like a game of basketball where nobody can touch you. I’ve probably been pulled down more than anybody in the past 10 or 12 years but you do these things for the team and any player who says they wouldn’t do it to get yourself into an All-Ireland semi-final would be a liar.”

Mickey Harte had been less philosophical when asked about the Cavanagh incident and those at half-time when Martin Penrose and Conor Gormley both landed punches to the face of Dessie Mone and in full view of two officials. Penrose was shown a red card prior to the restart while Gormley, somehow, got off and Harte took exception to being asked if he was concerned about his defender getting some correspondence from the CCCC midweek.

“It’s a worry there is so much focus on little things that happen in a game,” he responded, “and I would like to think if you really forensically examine the whole game you might find other things that would be of the same nature as you are speaking about. So I wish you’d talk about the good game that we had and stop delving into this negativity.”

Brolly’s rant about Cavanagh was eventually communicated second hand to Harte.

“I wouldn’t be surprised at that because that is par for the course,” he responded. Harte implored people to examine the 70 minutes forensically and spoke of how Peter Harte was the victim of just as much cynicism as any inter-county player on a regular basis and lambasted “certain individuals” in RTÉ for their “tirades”.