ULSTER SFC QUARTER-FINAL:AFTER NEARLY four months of speculation, Seanie Johnston's inclusion in the Cavan team for Saturday's Ulster football quarter-final represents something of a relief to all – with the obvious exception of Fermanagh.
The question “will he-won’t he” start had been doing the rounds since the first week in February, when Johnston fractured his elbow playing for DCU in the opening round of the Sigerson Cup, against UCD, and ever since then he’s been in a race against time to get himself right.
“I had to have an operation on it,” he explains, “to get plates and wires inserted, and I will have to go back and get more surgery on it at some stage. But when you haven’t played intercounty football for eight or nine months it’s very difficult to get straight back to that level.
“It is a huge step up in class and intensity and in most things that you talk about in football. It is just on a whole different level to club football and I haven’t really played club football yet either.
“I have been doing all the running so my fitness levels are quite good. It’s just that I have not got involved in any kind of contact work or physical work. It is just a matter of getting confidence back of going into tackles and when you are coming up against the likes of Fermanagh and whoever else you are likely to be meeting further down the road, you are likely to be getting hit.”
Cavan’s joy at beating Fermanagh last year was short-lived as they were unexpectedly beaten by Antrim in the Ulster semi-final – and Johnston looks back on the game as progress stalled: “I think it was a ‘leave it behind scenario’. Antrim completely deserved their victory but that was Cavan’s best chance of getting to an Ulster final in years and after getting that first-round win under our belts you would have thought that we would have been able to push on and that we would have been able to match any team.
“People will say Antrim needed to get to that Ulster final more than Cavan but I certainly don’t believe that. Cavan had not been in an Ulster final since 2001 and, apart from one or two, none of that group of players had played in an Ulster final. If we didn’t have the desire to get to an Ulster final there would have been something wrong.
“We just lacked it on the day and they should have beaten us more convincingly than they did. It was a huge disappointment and it took us some time to get over and you could see in the qualifiers, we still were not over it because we didn’t perform against Wicklow either. It was just a difficult one to get over.”
Although Cavan’s league form was typically mixed, there appears to be a new-found intent within the team, helped perhaps by last year’s controversial moves to oust Tommy Carr as manager, after just one year.
The players however gave Carr their full support, and with Johnston particularly vocal.
“I felt it was completely wrong and probably one of the main reasons that Tommy Carr stayed in the job was because he had the support of the majority of the players there. I think that has carried onto this year where there is a bit more of a team spirit.
“It is important players stick together and a lot of players came together and said that what was happening was wrong. How can we expect one man to change the fortunes of a county in five months that has been going so badly for eight or nine years?
“He has got another chance this year and time will only tell whether we have an improvement but he deserved another chance to try and get things right.”
