Latest news with #SeanCavanagh
The 42
24-05-2025
- Sport
- The 42
'If I was in that changing room right now, the blood would be flowing'
SOMEHOW, IT'S BEEN eight years since Sean Cavanagh last kicked a ball for Tyrone. During a 16-season senior career he won three All-Ireland titles, six Ulster titles, two National Leagues. Five All-Stars. A Young Footballer of the Year and a Footballer of the year. Captain of Ireland and winning International Rules series. He's still the holder of the record number of appearances for Tyrone. 239 times, as it happens. 196 in league and championship. 89 in championship. After county retirement, came an All-Ireland intermediate title with The Moy. Then seasons spent as player-manager. Controversy as a pundit with surprising comments about his former manager Mickey Harte. Business interests mushrooming and exploding. Tyrone never really replaced him. Neither have The Moy as he targets another season playing for them at 42. Here, he gets to the very heart of what still drives him. Declan Bogue: I was in Dungannon last year for a club championship match, standing behind the goals. I was watching you play in the intermediate championship game against The Rock and chatting to your former team mate Peter Donnelly. And I just asked him, like, what is that man doing? At his age? What has he left to prove? Sean Cavanagh: Do you know what, like, ironically now, I probably am able to appreciate the game more for the game itself. Through my county career, there's probably something inside me that I don't even understand what it is, but I demented myself through my kind of career. Like, I literally put myself to extremes that I know you'll always hear people say this, and a lot of the top people have it naturally, but if I was to tell you some of the things that I've done . . . if you were to speak to my wife Fionnuala and you were to get a list of some of the extremities that I went to whenever I was playing with county football, you'd say you're either lying or you're mad. I did player-manager for a few years, just as I was wrapping up and I took one year out. Actually, we end up getting relegated the year I took out. I said, 'look I'll just park it. I'm done.' As of right now, I haven't gone back yet this year. I've played a couple of training matches there the last couple of weeks, but I might, probably, will go back. With brother Colm Cavanagh after they won an All-Ireland intermediate title with The Moy in 2018. Ken Sutton / INPHO Ken Sutton / INPHO / INPHO It's only now I'm able to kind of enjoy the game whereby, for the most part of my career I was either physically torturing myself (or) training to levels that you would never understand. The whole irony is a lot of clients who don't even know the game, they go, 'Oh, you're the man who brought in the black card.' Whenever I was young coming through, I took a lot of abuse myself. I was maybe a marked man, and a lot of games I played probably weren't at times all that enjoyable because of that, you know, because I was getting physically manhandled. So ironically, now, the age of 42, I'll be able to go into the games, not be the main player, but yet enjoy the game for what it is. DB: You've four children now? SC: Two girls; Eva 14, Clara 12, Sean 7, and Lorcan's just turned 5 there, so four, and they're doing a lot of sports and things. I'm able to enjoy it. Every year I started as a Tyrone player, I had only one thing in my mind and that's, I'm being honest with you, it's just 'We're going to win another Ireland and I'm gonna give everything'. I remember the day I retired and I woke up the next morning and I went for a game of golf actually in Armagh. I remember someone saying to me, 'Are you going to miss it?' Not one day have I missed county football because I knew I left everything I could give to that, to that part of my life. I could not give any more. DB: Has the frustration you felt with Mickey Harte dimmed? You had one year under Art McRory and Eugene McKenna and 15 years under Mickey. That's some length of time to sustain a relationship. SC: I only had one year of Big Art and I absolutely adored the man. The impact he had on my career, and like ironically I didn't play all that much. I injured my ankle midsummer in in 2002 and I missed the Sligo game we lost. But some of the things he did for me! Even I was quite overweight and stuff, and I remember he used to very directly, but with like a joke with a jag. I remember one day I was sitting eating a bag of Tayto cheese and onion. I didn't eat salad sandwiches and the pre-match meals were salad sandwiches. We had a qualifier match down in Wexford, went to the shop, come back with a Tayto cheese and onion and a Snickers. He's looking at me and he was like, 'You know, big Cavanagh, if you get rid of that shit, you know, you're gonna be one of the best players in Ireland.' But aye, Mickey was, I actually think me and Mickey are very similar, you know. He's an incredibly competitive person and, and someone who came in and give us an incredible sort of winning attitude. But, look, there always was misunderstanding. Books complicate things. I'm sure if he was sitting here he would maybe see it differently than I did, but after the Cork game in 2009 Fionnuala's dad came in one day and he goes, 'do you see what's in the Sunday Times?' It was around the time Mickey was releasing a book and it was the headline was, 'The roof caved in on him,' about me not playing against Cork that day in the semi-final and I suppose that's that. Didn't do our relationship any good. Put it like that. But equally, I'm a great man at being able to put things into compartments in my life, move on very quickly. You'll have seen plenty of footage over the years after that, he'd made me captain in what's it, 2014-odd and I had some amazing times and even I remember after we won the games in 2013, we made the semi-final as well, plenty images where me and Mickey were as close as we ever were. With Mickey Harte in 2016. Lorraine.O'Sullivan Lorraine.O'Sullivan Things get muddied somewhat. Whenever I spent a bit of time then doing The Sunday Game and you have to make a comment. I remember making a comment that maybe, maybe it was coming up to the time that Mickey would look at making a bit of a change. And I think a lot of people saw that as a sort of some sort of a direct dig, but it never was. Like any 16-year relationship, there's always gonna be these wee moments of highs and lows, and I think everyone sometimes only sees the lows. I think if we're both being honest with each other, both of us loved Tyrone so fecking much! We're just very, very competitive as people and it's, it's sort of… I think I'm able to now as a 42 year old and an adult who sees life moving on very quickly . . . DB: Your business is brisk. You have accountancy firms in Dungannon, Omagh, Moy, Armagh, London. That's very busy. SC: I am involved in a London Irish Centre over there. I'm a trustee in at the Camden Centre. I'd had a lot of, a lot of friends and clients that were involved in that and brought me into the Centre a few years ago and I've fairly heavily involved ever since that, but yeah; very real, very real. A lot of people come to London in the '50s and '60s and literally had nothing and there's still the sort of dorms there at that Centre that a lot of people stayed in. DB: The Irish that came at that point, a huge number of them worked in hard jobs and had to keep their foremen sweet with drink, send a lot of money home, they weren't paying their stamp and they kept the Irish economy afloat at home. SC: And equally now, I see it in a business context where a lot of those people have now amazing businesses and you'd go, 'God, fair play, you're now running a business that has like I don't know, 200 million turnover,' and they'll go, 'I came over here and I had nothing. For the first ten years, I slept rough or I went to the Centre. 'I had no money to buy food and went to the Centre and they give me hot meals three times a week or something like and that sort of thing that kept me going.' Advertisement You don't have to look too far anywhere around the world, the Irish communities are still alive and well and people have always been very good to one another. DB: Your autobiography said a great deal about how hard work shaped your whole family. SC: I worked here (the Ryandale Hotel) as a 13 year old. I worked in a bar as a 13 year old. Mum washed the dishes. She was originally a cleaner here, sort of graduated on to be a cook. Dad's a labourer and still is a labourer and still to this day working at 72. He labours to a plasterer and mixes the plaster to put into the buckets. And I never had a minute as a kid in a summer holiday. I was woken up at 6 in the morning and told, 'Come on, you're coming to me on site,' so I went and I laboured with my dad, wheeling wheelbarrows and then worked in the evenings in the bar. Then I worked in a bar in The Four Seasons, Club Mex up in Monaghan. Never stopped. I'd get home probably about 4:15, the music stopped at like 2:30, and you always took about an hour to get red up. And then Tyrone minor training on a Sunday morning. My mum and dad aren't, they're not wealthy people by any means. But they're incredibly hardworking people. Both of them worked two jobs all my life, and they were manual jobs. Mummy was a cleaner and a cook, and Dad, as of right now, still has two jobs, labouring to a plasterer and he still is doing the door in Club Mex, four nights a week. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, he's not home until half four in the morning and then he gets up on the Monday morning and goes labouring. But you know what, that was the best thing that they ever gave me, you know, because it taught me that relationship between work and rewarding. I know sometimes people say this and it makes it sound very glossy and whatever, but it was the best thing ever happened to me because I've now just carried that work ethos. Mummy and dad would have said to me, 'Look, do you wanna go out on site with your dad, or do you want to go and get a career in something?' DB: Now you have a role helping members of the Gaelic Player's Association manage their businesses and finances? SC: It's something that started years ago. Like a business incubator scheme. If you spoke to a lot of the players playing in county football now have really, really, really good businesses, genuinely really good businesses. And with that, the GPA then supports them, so they'll come to us. We get them set up in business. Typically a lot of guys sort of go for coffee shops or saunas and gyms and things like that, but some of them have tech businesses, manufacturing. I saw a lot of people whenever I was playing sacrifice their own personal and business interests. A lot of ones are typically teachers and I'd go, 'Why are you teaching?' - 'Well, it kind of suits, you know, because I'm finished up at 2:30 or 3:30 in a day, and I'll be able to play football during the summer and all that. It was a bit of a bugbear of mine because I was like, 'You're gonna have a life after you finish as a county player.' After the All-Ireland final of 2008, when a switch to full-forward changed everything for Tyrone. Cathal Noonan / INPHO Cathal Noonan / INPHO / INPHO So it's class to be able to see lads now set things up while they're still county players that they'll be able to transfer their energies to them once the county thing comes to an end. I set my business up in the last year that I knew I was finishing with my county. I always had that natural transition in my mind. Whenever I took a defeat bad or I was annoyed about football – and I took it ridiculously seriously – I was able to flick very quickly and then into a very heavy enough sort of accountancy job at that point in time, so I was able to change very quickly and move my mind away from football and bring it somewhere else and then bring it back to football, and I felt the freshness of that, you know, I felt I was able to do that well. DB: That ambition meant you didn't care about being liked, which is very refreshing. SC: I've never been any different. I've always had a thing of saying what's in my mind, you know. I'm acutely aware that sometimes people take that in, in the wrong way. I remember whenever I was starting to play for Tyrone, someone saying to me, 'Just always say what's on your mind, because no one will ever be able to catch you out.' A lot of people sometimes have taken offence at what I've said even in punditry circles over the years. But I don't remember saying one thing that I regret. I don't remember saying anything and thinking to myself afterwards, 'God, you shouldn't have said that.' A lot of people that you would do the punditry with, they'll say something. You'd be sitting watching a game and they'll go, 'Such and such is doing this right or doing that wrong. And then they go on TV and they'll not say that. Meeting former team mates Conor Meyler and Darren McCurry after Tyrone won the 2021 All-Ireland. James Crombie / INPHO James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO They've got this great filter that they'll block away what they really feel and sugarcoat things and change things. I say exactly the same thing behind the camera as they do in front of the camera. DB: The danger is punditry is oftentimes it is not set in context. You are a man working in accountancy and aware of UK and Republic of Ireland directives and yet during the Covid Lockdowns you did a podcast in which you referred to being 'up here in the UK' and the fallout was ridiculous. SC: That was in an office 100 metres down the road. I did that interview on a Friday morning and in my heart, I'm useless in the morning and usually by Friday I'm wrecked as well after a long week of business. I never thought anything of it. I'm not political at all. I've never been into politics or religion, it's never been my thing. But that really hurt, like. It really hurt me as a person as well, because my proudest moment ever on a sporting field, I remember standing in Perth, 2008, captain of Ireland singing Amhrán na bhFiann, 45,000 people in the Subiaco Oval, hair standing in the back of my neck, feeling 'This is as good as it gets.' I was at a thing last Friday with Ciara Mageean and the Saffron Business Forum in Belfast and they're asking her, 'why did you get into athletics?' And she said, 'I wanted to get into a sport that I could represent Ireland on an international stage. And I felt like I was doing that, that evening in Perth. I felt, 'This is me leading my country tens of thousands of miles away from home.' Leading out Ireland for an International Rules game. Cathal Noonan / INPHO Cathal Noonan / INPHO / INPHO And because I'm not good at the whole language around politics, and because my work… If you went down to my office now and sat with me for an hour, all I ever do, because we have offices in Ireland and the UK and as in England and stuff, I'm always talking about the, the variances, the difference between under UK and Ireland. I'm going, 'Well, under UK legislation, under Irish legislation,' that's just how we speak, because there's two different jurisdictions there. That morning, Pat Spillane was talking about how he couldn't go for a walk on the beach. So in my mind, it was like trying to find a way of showing that difference between the Irish Covid response and the UK Covid response, because, you know every Sunday night I was watching the Boris Johnson announcements because he was telling us, all my staff can't work on the Monday morning. In my mind it was perfectly normal to reference the difference of the jurisdictions, but of course people just see that one clip it and think UK. I've always considered myself a very, very proud Irish person. And people who jumped on that at that time . . . It's very disappointing. A bit of a needless attack on something that in my mind was a simple mistake. DB: What are your impressions of Tyrone? Because there was the All Ireland in '21, but the support and interest, even for the U20 teams who are so successful, has plummeted. SC: It really worried me last year. I was up at the Roscommon game in Omagh, and I met a few guys that are really, really good Tyrone supporters. There was nobody at the game really, and even they were sort of shrugging their shoulders. It's actually sad. I brought my wee kids up to the game in in Clones there, the Tyrone-Armagh game. I was at a Go Games that morning in Derrytresk and I was asking lads were they going to the game that evening? And they're like, 'Nah, nah. Hassle . . . Saturday evening in Clones . . .' I played a lot of basketball, played a lot of soccer as well. One of the reasons I played Gaelic football, I did like the sport, but it was the games. '95 and the 13 men against Derry, Canavan, 11 points, wherever it was, I remember standing on the hill that day. I remember going, 'Wow! Like this is a spectacle, this makes the hair stand the back of my neck.' And now I'm hearing a lot of people in Tyrone going, 'I'm not gonna bother going up.' This is our biggest rivals, all Ireland champions, hot summer's day, Saturday evening. Why is nobody going? I think it's just a bit of a disconnect in the county in the last few years, See that we've had some mediocre enough performances, but I think as a county we need something to ignite us again. DB: A win in Ballybofey this Saturday would surely do that? SC: If we don't get a result in Ballybofey, which everyone knows how tricky it is against a McGuinness team up there and all the psychology that goes with that one. But, if we don't win on Saturday night, essentially it leaves us to a place that it's a must-win against Mayo. But I left Clones that evening of the Armagh game with a friend of mine and turned to him and I just said, 'You know what, Tyrone's in a good place.' I think Malachy has seen a few things. A few players maybe just aren't ready or weren't ready, and I think it'll take those changes, but I think myself, we played at 50 or 60% and we were in a position to win with three minutes to go. To give up so much possession on a dry day and concede that against Armagh, yeah, I don't think they'll do that again. Brian Kennedy and Ben McDonnell on that day was very good, Conn Kilpatrick, we do have a lot of size, and Hampsey will come back into that mix and Kieran McGeary's a strong lad. I think Malachy recognised that was something that he will change. Ironically, I left thinking to myself, 'God, we're better off going this route.' We're better off because it keeps us out of the limelight. Cavan put their head down there for a few weeks, went down to Castlebar and get away and that's why you're sort of thinking: Tyrone have always been good in the long grass. The team who wins All Ireland are the team that that has the most momentum coming into June, July, that's what Armagh did last year. I'm not saying Tyrone's in a position by any means to win an All Ireland, but I think we're in a good position to take a couple of scalps and be very hard to beat. DB: Why is Ballybofey such a graveyard? SC: I think Jim McGuinness is a genius at putting out all these subliminal hints. They're not the team I played against, you know, where the two McGees were pulling the head off you, and Lacey, real tough tough cornerbacks and defensive players. Against Neil McGee. Presseye / Andrew Paton/INPHO Presseye / Andrew Paton/INPHO / Andrew Paton/INPHO For me anyway, it was always about the psychology. I remember the bus pulling up one year and it being soaking wet and we just got these new white shirts and being told we had to get off the bus and walk in. And then I remember we went to try to get into the changing rooms and they said, 'No. Changing rooms are closed.' And we had to change in a squash court. It was like the New York Yankees stripes, like you were beaten before the ball was thrown in. And the toilet, I remember one of the toilets we went to try we were told, 'No, the toilet's closed, it's blocked or whatever.' DB: This sounds more than unusual! SC: Well, here, it can't all be coincidence that we couldn't get the bus couldn't through the gate, and the toilet was closed when we went up to play them in Ballybofey. And then the sidelines used to always be brought in as well. So in my mind, I'm a very analytical person, so those wee things always played in my mind. I was going, 'Why is the lines taken in three metres from when we play here in the league? Why is that toilet locked? So all of a sudden, you're getting angry. Your fire has been stoked and all the while you're thinking to yourself, 'This an ambush. We're in trouble here. So they have you on the back foot'. And I don't know whether it's because the record and the McGuinness factor and the crowd's so close and everything, but you just always feel, 'we're up against it here today.' But look, Tyrone went and won there in 2018. It's a new team. Donegal is not the same team. They haven't got that same physical prowess and power and defence that they always had. If anything, the tight pitch might go against them. So, you could turn a lot of the factors around now to say Tyrone might have the edge in certain areas that they didn't previous. I think Malachy's a brilliant manager, and I think he has a good group of players there right now. I think there is going to be a moment and hopefully it's the next few weeks that arrives. They were good against Cavan. They don't get that much credit because it was Cavan. Tyrone were expected to beat Cavan and always have beaten Cavan, but, I do feel that this Tyrone team does need a big scalp and a big statement. That's what we are as a county, I think that's who we are. As people as well. I always loved being in that changing room where we felt we were chasing something. That people wrote us off and I think Tyrone people rise to that narrative. I think if I was in that changing room right now, the blood would be flowing and I'd be thinking, 'what a chance we have here.' Seán Cavanagh was speaking to mark the launch of a new partnership between the Gaelic Players Association and LIA, the leading organisation in the education and development of financial advice and planning professionals. This new collaboration will see the 'Smart Money Habits' financial wellbeing programme made available to 4,000 GPA members, enhancing financial literacy across multiple key areas. Check out the latest episode of The42′s GAA Weekly podcast here
Irish Daily Mirror
12-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
Louth v Meath decision that left Royals boss disappointed labelled 'karma'
Sean Cavanagh described the late free that won Louth the Leinster Championship as 'karma' for their 2010 final defeat to Meath. The Wee County overcame their rivals in front of over 60,000 people at Croke Park on Sunday as Sam Mulroy kicked over what proved to be a winning two-point free before a Craig Lennon point doubled their advantage. Meath manager Robbie Brennan questioned the validity of the free, which was won by Conal McKeever, after the match. He said: "Disappointed. The two-pointer one, it's on the TV (big screen) you can see it's not a foul. "They're fine margins and we said at half-time the 1% margins, as the rugby boys always say, is what you have to go after. A few of them fell Louth's way but that's not to take away from Louth and how well they played. But, yeah, we're frustrated with some of them but I'm sure we got a couple of bounces our way as well. We just have to go with it." The incident was discussed on RTE's live coverage of the match, with former Dublin player Ciaran Whelan saying: "Meath will look at this tonight and they'll kind of wonder. I don't think it's a free being honest when you see the replay. "I don't know what Mark McNally's seen but that's a two-pointer free. We spoke about Mulroy before the game and that goes from one point down to one point up. "I think there's four or five minutes on the clock showing at that point and then they go for home." Tyrone legend Cavanagh responded by saying: "We'll call that free 2010 karma. I felt Louth were full value for it." "(Tommy) Durnin took a couple of great fetches in midfield, (Ciaran) Downey's running, Mulroy was like for Louth what Michael Murphy was for Donegal yesterday. He was the centre of everything. I felt they were full value for the win."
