Cavan must show up against Mayo
Analysis.
Will Cavan bate Mayo? Not if they have Willie Joe! Well, they don’t and the absence of a blood-stained warrior who always falls off the field after giving his all to the cause maybe gives us a chance.
Mayo have been a staple fixture in Division 1 for some time now and have made it to the knock-out stages of the All-Ireland almost every year recently. Nobody could say with any certainty that they expect a Cavan win but after watching the Connacht final, you can definitely see ways they can be got at.
Kevin McStay has tried to bring more control to the way Mayo play and the Mayo supporters are split in their opinion on whether it’s a good or a bad thing.
Mayo, over the last decade, have earned the name of a team that thrives in chaos and it’s hard to argue with it. They almost always brought Dublin, the greatest team of all time, to the wire and made them more uncomfortable than any other team managed to. Their level of conditioning for the All-Ireland finals of 2016 and 2017 was the best in the country. They weren’t as good with the ball as Dublin pound-for-pound but they had the ability to run harder for longer and that’s why they came so close.
Now we see Dublin-like signs in game management with the ball-carrier holding one arm up in the air to signal Mayo want to keep the ball until they manufacture a high-percentage scoring chance. Maybe the change in strategy is because the personnel is very different from the last three Mayo teams that made it to All-Ireland final day.
From the team that lost out to Tyrone in 2021, Rob Hennelly, Pádraig O’Hora, Lee Keegan, Michael Plunkett, Oisín Mullin, Bryan Walsh and Kevin McLoughlin didn’t play in the Connacht final this year. On the evidence we have so far, what they have been replaced by isn’t of the same standard.
Mayo play a man-for-man defence which leaves them open at the back. There, they trust David McBrien, Sean Fitzgerald and Sam Cullinan to do man-marking jobs even if there is an ocean of space in front of them.
Galway identified a number of players at the back that they felt they could get at with Rory Brickenden targeted specifically as his ability to turn is his weakness.
Kevin McStay’s side switched between types of zonal presses and man-to-man pressing on opposition kick-outs and had some joy with each type but nothing they consistently went to when they had a must-win kick-out.
They are happy to press high up the field in open play which leaves them vulnerable to kick-passes to the scoring zone, taking out a lot of support that could get back to help their defence if needed. Galway, for a lot of the Connacht final this year, kicked from the middle third of the field to Damien Comer who took on David McBrien a lot. When it’s a one -on-one inside the opposition 45, you have to back the forward to get a score or win a free in that situation and Galway often did just that.
They sometimes have Aidan O’Shea at full-forward and other times have him out the field leaving Ryan O’Donoghue and Tommy Conroy closer to goal. Conroy is like Oisin Brady in terms of his agility and takes watching while O’Donoghue is a shoot-on-sight type of player. When it’s not going O’Donoghue’s way, he becomes frustrated and tries to force his way into the game with low-percentage shots.
If you look at the players Mayo brought on to finish the job in the Galway game, you’d imagine the two O’Connor brothers, Conor Loftus and Enda Hession would be the perfect finishers given the amount of experience they have. Yet with three minutes of injury time remaining, they managed to let a two-point lead slip away. Watching Mayo you can’t help but think it all just looks like they are still trying to find out what style works best for them.
Between league and championship Mayo have scored 11-142 in 10 games and have conceded 7-128. They score on average 2.5 points more than they concede and in all bar the New York game, they have scored between 12 and 16 scores. In every game in which Mayo scored more goals than their opposition, they won, which happened four times this year.
With Colm Reape in goals, teams appear to be able to get at the Mayo kick-out a bit. Galway used a zonal press to great effect in the Connacht final in the second half to get the lead early in the final quarter, to equalise in injury-time and to get the winner shortly after.
All three of those happened after Aidan O’Shea was off the field which might explain why Galway didn’t use it all the time,
On the Cavan side, it feels like a long time ago that Tyrone came to Kingspan Breffni but the lessons are still raw.
The question is still there, if we had really gone for it earlier in the game would we have been in an Ulster semi-final and taken that rarest of scalps?
With Paddy Lynch now out injured for the year it leaves an opening for someone else to step up and take not only the frees but the main forward role. We have seen Oisin Brady taking frees very successfully for Cavan in the past so he is the front-runner but that still leaves another forward position up for grabs.
Cormac O’Reilly did really well off the bench against Monaghan and Tyrone in showing he can be a huge asset but he is yet to do it as a starter. Caoimhin O’Reilly is another that will strongly be in the running and he is capable of almost anything but both O’Reillys need to improve a bit when the opposition have the ball.
If Killian Clarke is back fully fit then he could free up James Smith to go to the full-forward line or Ryan O’Neill could come straight in. The other option is if Dara McVeety is back from his injury, he could play close to goals as his movement, energy and ball-winning ability would cause any defender problems.
With Mayo going man-for-man and pressing with intent all over the field, Gary O’Rourke is going to have to be a safe back-door option a lot of the time. The match-ups will be interesting but I think O’Connell could take Conroy and Jason McLoughlin could pick up O’Donoghue. Faulkner, Clarke or Conor Brady could pick up O’Shea but my money would be on Faulkner.
The sceptics of the Tailteann cup have used poor attendances at games in the last two seasons as a reason to show that it didn’t get the buy-in from the supporters. It will be interesting to see do the Cavan supporters make their way to Castlebar in big numbers for a Sam Maguire game. If they do, they will want firstly to come away with a win but failing that, that the team really has a go at Mayo.
If we don’t play with maximum intensity then Mayo will gain energy, grow in confidence, and most likely come away with the win. But if we play the way we played against Tyrone in the second half, then we’ll have no regrets or wonders and there is a chance of an upset.