Cavan v Tyrone: A long-standing hoodoo

Sports editor of the Anglo Celt, Paul Fitzpatrick, has never witnessed Cavan defeat Tyrone in championship football

By Niall Gartland

HE arrived a year too late. Paul Fitzpatrick, sports editor of historic Cavan newspaper The Anglo Celt, was born in 1984, a year after the Breffni County’s last victory over Tyrone in championship football.

More than 40 years later, and Cavan must be sick of the sight of the men in red and white. Fitzpatrick freely admits there are mental scars.

The Redhills clubman was appointed as sports editor of the ‘Celt back in 2006. Eleven years elapsed before he got the opportunity to cover a Cavan win of any description over Tyrone at adult level – a 2017 McKenna Cup victory at Breffni Park. That alone tells you the nature of this very one-sided rivalry.

And there’s no escaping it, either: at school’s level, club level, underage level, Tyrone have had the hex over Cavan. Their supporters will travel to Brewster Park for the latest installment this Sunday more in hope than expectation, put it that way. And hope is possibly too strong a word.

Fitzpatrick starts off by making the fundamental point that, well, Tyrone have quite simply been better than Cavan for most of the last four decades, so what can you expect? But he digs a little deeper and there’s no getting away from it – there’s also something psychological about it all. 2016 is the prime example – he rates that Cavan team especially highly, but they played Tyrone on four separate occasions and could never seal the deal. Indeed in an Ulster Championship replay that year, Cavan were beaten out the gate on a scoreline of 5-18 to 2-17.

But first, the argument against there being an inferiority complex.

Fitzpatrick said: “One thing I always point out is that we’ve never run into a bad Tyrone team.

“We haven’t beaten Tyrone since 1983, and look at the years we’ve lost – in 1986 and 1995, Tyrone got to the All-Ireland final, in 2005 Tyrone won the All-Ireland, in 2016 they won Ulster, in 2018 they got to the All-Ireland final and in 2021 they won the All-Ireland. So that’s one factor to be considered.”

But there’s no escaping it. Cavan’s record is fairly abysmal against the Red Hands, whatever the context.

He said: “The thing about it is, we struggle against Tyrone in all grades of football. Cavan teams have done very well in recent years in the Ulster Junior Club Championship – Denn and Arva won Ulster but they never played anyone from Tyrone. The one team that ran into Tyrone in the middle of that run was Drumlane, and they were beaten by Stewartstown on penalties in the Ulster final.

“Our u-21s did beat Tyrone twice in Ulster finals, and the minors won an Ulster semi-final in 2011, and the minors beat Tyrone in a tier-two competition last year, but the wins are so rare that they stick out in my memory.”

Another element in favour of a hoodoo is the nature of some of those defeats. Tyrone absolutely smoked Cavan in an Ulster Championship semi-final in 2005, Peter Canavan and Stephen O’Neill having a field day, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

“Tyrone have delivered so many proper hammerings so there’s definitely scar tissue. I remember a McKenna Cup game a few years ago where they came down and beat us by 20-something points.

“Cavan didn’t beat Tyrone in anything from the McKenna Cup in 2001 until another McKenna Cup game in 2017, that was Mattie McGleenan’s first game in charge. There were no wins in league or championship.

“Even in 2016, Cavan had a really good side, I think it was actually better than the team that won Ulster in 2020 – they were bigger and probably had more firepower. They ended up playing Tyrone four times that year, a league game, a league final in Croker and two championship matches. We had four cracks at Tyrone and we couldn’t beat them in any of them.”

So nobody, not least the Cavan faithful, is giving Raymond Galligan’s men much of a chance of upsetting the odds in Sunday’s All-Ireland group stage finale, as Fitzpatrick acknowledged.

“There wouldn’t be too many giving Cavan much hope in this game – people are scarred by all these defeats.

“Ask anyone from Cavan and they’d always have huge respect for Tyrone – they always say Tyrone are the benchmark in Ulster, and even a bad Tyrone team is never too bad. They never dip too low. Tyrone’s worst team is usually not much worse than our best.

“I think it’s a psychological thing from both perspectives – I’m sure Tyrone don’t respect Cavan, and why would they? I’m 41 and we’ve never actually beaten Tyrone in my life-time.”

Fitzpatrick does want to make one final point – and this time, it’s not Tyrone-related. Cavan were clobbered by Donegal in their last group stage match on a scoreline of 3-26 to 1-13. On paper it was an awful hiding, and yes, it certainly wasn’t a good day at the office, but Fitzpatrick makes the point that it wasn’t a total unmitigated disaster from start-to-finish.

“I looked back at previous bad beatings that Cavan got – for example against Tyrone in the 2005 replay, it was 3-12 to 0-4 12 minutes into the second-half.

“At the same juncture against Donegal, Paddy Lynch had just missed an easy free and if that had gone over, there’d have been four points between the teams heading into the final 20 minutes, and Cavan had the wind at their backs.

“So Cavan actually played well for about 45 minutes and did an awful lot right – it’s just that Donegal scored 2-11 in the final 20 minutes which is nearly unheard of. It’s difficult to process, it’s not as if the gameplay was completely wrong.

“We just seemed to capitulate and the players were gassed as well – it was such a poisonous game too with the carry-on in the sidelines that when Donegal got on top, there really was no let up at all.”