McCoy urges Cavan Gaels to keep foot on the gas during break

By Shaun Casey

IT’S a break week in the Cavan Championship but Cavan Gaels manager Declan McCoy doesn’t want his side to take their foot off the gas.

After a first round defeat to Mullahoran, McCoy’s men bounced back last weekend as they proved much too strong for Laragh United, winning comfortably 1-29 to 0-12.

They have been drawn against Arva the next day out, in two weeks’ time, and they will be expecting a much trickier assignment. Arva also lost out on the first day but got the better of Killygarry last Sunday.

“We have a free weekend now and then we play Arva in round three in two weeks and that’ll be another tough game,” said the Dromintee native.

“Most people might slightly favour Arva, but we’ll see what happens. Whoever wins that game is probably through to the quarter-finals and whoever loses it, they’ll be into the last game needing to win it to get through.

“We had a six-week break between the league and the championship, so we got three big games in. I’ve been chasing challenge matches all this week because when you get into the swing of football, you want games.

“Everybody is mad with football this week in other counties, so I’m struggling to get a challenge. We’ll likely just try and get a bit of in-house work done and a bit of fitness.

“It depends on your scenario, if you have a couple of injuries the break is great because you can nurse a few back but when you’re in the mode of games, boys just want to keep playing week on week.”

Reflecting back on their performance in round two, McCoy was just happy to get the points on the board to increase his team’s chances of reaching the final eight of the competition.

“We were very disappointed after the Mullahoran game because we didn’t perform like we could and then we played well last weekend and we’re just happy to get the points,” continued McCoy, now in his second season in charge.

“In Cavan, there’s been a lot of results that you wouldn’t expect so you just want to get out the gap and into the quarter-finals, I think a lot of teams are in the same boat.

“It’s a long championship in Cavan because you have 12 teams that play four games each and then the top eight go through to the quarter-finals so it’s hard to read teams at the minute, a lot of them aren’t even peaking yet.”