In the early 2000s I was reading a special GAA Championship pull-out from a national newspaper, in which they compared each county to an English soccer team based on said county's Gaelic football pedigree. Of course - as any true sports fan would - I skimmed straight down the page to see what club they had compared the mighty Cavan to.
The Racket:
It goes without saying that things weren't going all that well for Cavan football at the time so my expectations were slightly tempered. I was thinking we'd be a Liverpool or a Leeds United. You know ... a team who has great pedigree but has fallen away from the top of the mountain in more recent years. But no, the journalist in question - who shall remain nameless, for both the reasons that he would now undoubtedly face a barrage of smug tweets and also because of the fact that I can't remember who it was - decided that the status of Cavan's senior football team most resembled that of Huddersfield Town. Huddersfield feckin Town!
Despite the fact that this comparison may have looked, to the neutral observer, an entirely accurate one (Huddersfield won three successive league titles in the 1920s but did F all after that) I was appalled. Was this how the rest of the country viewed us? You see, for years some of us in Cavan have been guilty of suffering from a rare type of GAA superiority complex; an unwavering feeling of self-importance despite the fact that we were, for all intents and purposes, very bad at football.
However, after a decade or two of penance we can justifiably gloat again.
Of course there are those that will argue that it's only the league but when you follow a team through all the hard years it's because you travel in the hope that a moment will come where you can take legitimate joy and satisfaction. While days like Sunday may be the fleeting they will not be forgotten. Whether it be the eight-year-old who was inspired by seeing their hero triumph or the 80-year-old who's been getting rained on at Cavan games for over half a century — since they rode a bicycle to Croke Park to watch their county win its last All-Ireland.
It's fitting that 'Hero of the Half Acre - The Willie Doonan Story', a play about a man who once played an All-Ireland semi-final under the added pressure of his imminent arrest by the Irish Army, will finish its second run in the Ramor Theatre the night before the people of Breffni set out to the country's capital once more. The ghosts of Doonan and his teammates will forever attend Cavan football but perhaps this current crop of players are starting to write themselves in history.
That chat is for another day however. For moments yet to come. For now we can relax and look forward to the summer and to next year, when Huddersfield Town will take its rightful place in the Premier League.
