CAVAN county board’s resistance to putting forward a senior hurling team for the Lory Meagher has some merit, but their vagueness about the future of the game is confusing.

With just a few weeks to go until the start of the Allianz Leagues, time is running out if Cavan are to make a comeback to senior inter-county league hurling in 2016.

Over the past few months, the Cavan Concerned Hurling Committee (CCHC) has been pushing strongly for the inclusion of a senior hurling team in this year’s league.

The call has been resisted by the Cavan county executive who believe that the return of the Breffni hurlers to senior competition at this time would be counterproductive.

County secretary Liam McCabe has been colourful in his description of the CCHC, stating that they are living ‘in cuckoo land’: “These guys who are saying we are ready are living in cuckoo land. They’re not thinking straight at all. They just see this as the promised land. It’s all right saying you have 30 players. I mean, I could gather up 40 players in the morning. Anyone could do that.

“But they have to be of a certain standard and they have to be able to hurl and compete. I’m not asking them to be able to advance further than the Lory Meagher, just to be able to compete in it. Even if they didn’t win a match, but were only beaten by four or five points, that would be something. The last time we played in it we were hammered. What good is that to anybody?”

To be fair to McCabe, there’s a fair amount of logic in his reasoning. And in a perfect world, his suggestion that Cavan wait until they have a team worthy of the senior tag would carry weight.

But the world of Cavan hurling isn’t perfect. It is far from perfect, and you have to wonder what stars will have to align before the current county board consider that they are ‘ready’ to return to senior county hurling.

That’s the issue I have – the ‘let’s wait and see how we go’ policy of the Cavan county board. What exactly are they waiting for? Back in 2011 when the decision was announced that Cavan would be withdrawing from all senior competition, there was a vagueness about when they would return.

That vagueness still persists with current chairman Gerry Brady stating that they ‘hope’ to be ready in 2017.

Vagueness has permeated the self-imposed exile from senior competition. When the decision was made in 2011, the senior manager PJ Martin had thought that they were planning only to forfeit the opening round game of the Lory Meagher Cup of that year; the then Cavan chairman Tom Reilly said initially that the hiatus would last for one year, then revised that to an indefinite figure; while various return dates and benchmarks have been mentioned by key figures such as hurling development officer Eoin Morissey, former senior manager John Hunt and Willie Gaughan, who was chairman of the Cavan hurling board in 2008-09.

The fact now however is that there is a group of players who feel the time is right and a county executive who feel that it isn’t.

Reilly, in an article in the Anglo-Celt newspaper in July 2013, reckoned that four to six adult club teams were needed to field a county team worthy of the name.

Gaughan, in the same article, felt that five teams were needed. There are currently only three adult teams in the county.

While Cavan’s underage scene has been transformed under Morrissey and more recently the late Shane Mulholland, the establishment of new teams and clubs at senior level has taken more time than predicted.

With the benefit of hindsight, those benchmarks were extremely optimistic. Reilly predicted ‘that 10 teams by 2018 would be great’, but realistically thought six teams could be established in that period, while Morrissey predicted that Cavan could be a Division 2A/B team within 10 years. I wouldn’t be too quick to cast up those figures however – the ever optimistic Paudie Butler predicted that there could be 15 clubs in Cavan by 2016.

A bit of revisionist thinking is firmly required then, as is a firmer commitment from the county board. Cavan’s hurling fraternity deserve more than to be told they are in cuckoo land. At five-plus years, it is far enough into their senior exile for a realistic roadmap to be set down by the county board.

The longer they leave it, the more the fuel it adds to the suspicion, voiced by many within the county, that the withdrawal of the senior team from senior competition was motivated by a desire to save money, allegations that have always been refuted by the county board.

At the minute, Cavan senior hurling is in a vacuum. It is the same vacuum that was acknowledged by Reilly when the minors of 2012, who had reached the All-Ireland C final, had no under-21 set-up to go into.

In 2015, the Cavan under-21s lost by a point to Sligo in the All-Ireland series, the minors won the Ulster Division 2 League and Shield Championship in 2014.

I can’t help thinking that for a group of young hurlers coming into their early 20s in Cavan, that’s as good as it’s likely to get. I would fear that the perfect storm that Cavan county board seem to be waiting for will never arrive.

The participation figures that have been held up by Reilly and others – and we can all understand their thinking – may take another 10 years to materialise. But the longer they are out of senior hurling, the more difficult it is to return – sooner or later you have to bite the bullet.
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