“IN my head, I was gonna hit another f***ing ten points, and then that happened.”
Martin Dunne delivers his words the same assertive way his feet had punched scores against the scantily-clad Armagh defence in 2013.
The space he and Eugene Keating got that afternoon wasn’t even of its own time. The game had moved on, but Paul Grimley had held on tight to principles that would see Joe Brolly savage him on RTÉ at half-time that day.
Dunne kicked nine points, eight of them from play. As championship debuts go, this was living the dream.
He would finish his first summer as the first Cavan forward to be nominated for an Allstar since 1997, emulating Ronan Carolan, Damien O’Reilly and Peter Reilly in making the shortlist if not the team.
The championship’s top scorer from play, left just shy of being its top scorer overall by Cillian O’Connor’s eight pointed frees in the final, an Irish News Ulster Allstar.
At 24, he was a bit of a late bloomer but no matter. Plenty of years ahead.
Martin Dunne would play 30 more minutes of championship football for Cavan.
By the time he turned 27, he was gone, never to return.
The straight line between terrorising poor Paul McKeown in 2013 and being targeted by the same opposition in an infamous pre-match melee a year later was an easy one to draw. But that’s not how it was.
Ciaran McKeever had led the Armagh team in behind the Cavan flag for the parade, taking the outside lane nearest the supporters.
As the visitors finished their warm-up and came across to take their place behind the St Michael’s Enniskillen band, there was a loose agreement that they’d just leave it.
But once one man broke rank, they all did. Armagh had laid the bait.
Dunne was at the tail end of the cavalcade, ready to take his place at the back of the parade. When he arrived, he found a young Dara McVeety taking some punishment.
“Dara was in a tight enough situation in front of me, I just swung to try and get a fella off him and came down too steeply on the back of his head.
“It all happened so fast. It probably could have been dangerous but it was funny at the same time. It was just lads flailing in everywhere.”
He’s never ascertained who was manhandling McVeety. It didn’t, and doesn’t, really matter.
The instinctive and rapid nature of it the shenanigans are underlined by the fact it was Dunne’s weaker left hand that he damaged.
“I’m completely right-handed,” he recalls, almost wondering aloud why he’d chosen to strike out with the left.
Cavan’s assistant manager Anthony Forde had come in to help settle things and as it cooled, Dunne told him to get the physio to come and strap the hand, that it was feeling sore. He could still make a fist with it, so he thought it’d be ok.
“By the time the national anthem was being played, I was starting to think something definitely wasn’t right.
“The physio came out to tape it out and I took the glove off, I couldn’t get it back on. The hand was completely swelled up. The bones were just smashed up.
“I’ll never forget the warm-up that day either, I knew I was on it. Outside the left, outside the right, everything was going straight over…” He had broken three bones in his hand. He was hastily removed from the starting line-up, replaced by Jack Brady.
Few would have guessed at the time, least of Dunne himself, that would be the last championship starting line-up he’d appear in for Cavan.
When he was seen in Santry, they gave him two options. One was an operation that would have seen “hard plastic” inserted into his hand, and the other was to wear a splint and see if it would heal itself.
The next time he played football was his only appearance that year, long after Cavan’s year was done. Peter Canavan had named him joint-captain of Cavan Gaels and he came on for the final 15 minutes of the county final win over Kingscourt.
He finished up with six county medals. He effectively gave up the ghost at the end of 2021, the inhibitions of life as an 11-stone inside forward in the blanket era eventually wearing him down.
He was only 32 when he quit but jumped straight into management with Drumlane, taking them to an Ulster junior final before moving on last winter to Carrigallen in Leitrim, just down the road from where he now lives in Butlersbridge.
Dunne chipped at a bit of reserve football and found Seanie Johnston’s persuasion too hard to ignore last summer, agreeing to tog out and wear number 29 for a senior group game against Killygarry in old Breffni.
And then with 59 minutes gone and the tie needing rescued, the SOS came.
“I came on for one minute but I shouldn’t have, to be honest. It was a bit stupid to go on.
“I didn’t want to make a scene but I should have said no,” he says, insisting that it definitely is over this time.
Turned 35 in January, his club career fulfilled him in some ways.
His inter-county career did not.
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ACROSS the aisle, Seanie Johnston is smiling back and forth.
When Martin Dunne was growing up, he idolised Johnston. He’d study his game at Breffni, at Terry Coyle Park, and copy everything about it, right down to the under armour they both wore on matchdays.
They played in the same position, their games built on the same strengths, neither of them particularly physical. It was a natural fit.
Dunne would watch his movement, develop two feet the same way, and grew up wanting to play alongside him.
So when it came to the first day he made a Cavan 26, it was strange that Seanie was across the aisle wearing the pristine white of Kildare.
“It was actually funny that day. I was sitting on one side of the dugout, there was the row of steps down on to the pitch, and there’s the other dugout. Seanie’s sitting there and we’re laughing over at each other, going ‘this is mad’.”
When he was still minor, Malachy O’Rourke had seen enough to throw Dunne into the Ulster Club series in 2007, having left him alone to play his minor football up until then.
He maintains they’d have won Ulster in the years after if O’Rourke hadn’t been lured away by the whistles of his native Fermanagh.
Terry Hyland first had him at U21. Dunne was only getting the last drag out of games. The pair of them just never clicked.
“I had played county minors, minor player of the year, won two senior championships straight off the bat, playing in all the games, got top scorer one of the years in the championship.
“I don’t know how I wasn’t playing. That’s not being cocky, I just couldn’t understand how I couldn’t get a game with the U21s.”
It was Val Andrews that wanted to bring him in and made the call in 2012, by which stage he was 23 but aware that he was “small and skinny” and that he’d needed that time.
He kicked 2-21 in the National League but wrecked his ankle in the final game against Antrim and was only back for the Kildare game that ended their summer, playing the role of unused sub.
He’d move into the juniors and win a Leinster championship before resetting for 2013.
Hyland was by then in sole charge of the seniors following the departure of Andrews at the end of the previous league campaign.
Dunne’s feet were under the table by then and he stuck it out. Another 3-18 racked up in the league in 2013, he felt he’d left it so that he couldn’t not be picked for Armagh.
That first summer went really well, propelled by the debut shootout success. They’d lose an Ulster semi-final to winners Monaghan by a point and end up in Croke Park in an All-Ireland quarter-final with Kerry, helping Dunne step into the national eyeline.
The following year’s league was ok, still registering 1-19, before the broken hand wiped the summer out.
He got back for the start of 2015 and chipped through the league without ever setting it alight. Come championship, he lost his place for the opener against Monaghan, coming on with 18 minutes to go.
A month later they were in Ruislip for a qualifier. Dunne had picked up a knock a fortnight earlier but trained the week of the game.
They’d flown out early and trained over in London before the team was named.
“We went into the meeting and the team was named, I was fuming that I wasn’t starting. Then the 26 came up and I wasn’t on the 26.
“I remember I was sitting beside Damien O’Reilly and I just goes ‘I didn’t even get on the f***ing 26 here, what the f***?’”
“How can you go from being an Allstar nominee to not even making the 26?
“After that game, that was me done with Cavan, I didn’t want to be there.”
He told management he wasn’t going back but Anthony Forde rang him and convinced him to come and meet them.
They’d been drawn against Roscommon, the latest instalment of an ongoing one-sided rivalry that the Connacht men dominated.
Dunne got the plamas about how he usually plays well against them and was restored to the matchday squad, but was only a late sub again in a game that was long gone.
His last act in a Cavan jersey was to kick a point off his left foot from 35 yards, something he’d honed since he was a young lad in Terry Coyle Park, copying Seanie Johnston or his cousin Mickey Graham to the letter.
There’s no part of him that shies away from his feelings on it all.
“It was well enough known how I felt about Terry and how Terry felt about me. I never felt I was a player that he would have been saying ‘he’s definitely nailed on for me’.
“Even though I was putting the performances in, I knew in the back of my mind that if I have one bad game here, I ain’t gonna get a game because he ain’t gonna play me. That’s just the way it rolled.”
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THIS was a time when Cavan were trying to migrate into a new way of playing under Hyland.
The same Joe Brolly that ripped Paul Grimley’s defensive setup in 2013 to pieces would come to christen Hyland’s men as The Black Death, a tag that they haven’t deserved for a long time but have only truly shed in the last few years.
For the four years he was around the Cavan panel, Dunne weighed between 68kg (10st 10lb) and 70kg (11st).
He was never mad for the pursuit of closing the gap on the tight-fit sleeves. He went hard at the gym the winter after the first summer but felt its impact was contrary to what he was naturally.
“I felt it slowed me down. I wouldn’t have been in the gym putting on 10kg. My game was all about off the mark, quick movement. “After ‘13 I did go hard in the gym that winter and bulked up, and I felt I was so sluggish in matches then I eased off that and was flying before that championship game, I felt I was really at it.”
He plays Devil’s Advocate in his own mind for a moment, questioning whether Hyland’s apparent distrust of him was down to his size, even whether it was justified in some way. But the conclusion in his own mind is always the same.
“I was a small player, I wasn’t very physical and I probably wouldn’t have been the best of ball-winners either.
“But the way I would have looked at it from a manager’s point of view, right, who are our scorers?
“There’s not too many Cavan players would get top scorer in the championship. We weren’t blessed with forwards that were gonna go out and kick seven or eight points every game.
“We didn’t have too many Allstar nominees back then or before that. The way I’d look at it, if you’re good enough to do that, you’re good enough to get into the team.
“I think Gearoid [McKiernan] was top scorer one of the years after that and before that, I’d say it’s probably 25 years since Cavan had anyone on that. They’re the things I’d be looking at.
“You’re getting Ulster Allstars and Allstar nominees and top scorer, surely you’re good enough to play? Maybe I’m wrong. If I was the manager, I’d want someone that was doing that because we hadn’t had anyone doing that in so long.
“I’m sure if you talk to Terry or Anthony, there’d be different sides of the story. But I was never going to play my best football for Cavan because I wasn’t made feel wanted.
“I’m not slating Terry. He gave us everything he had to Cavan football, his time and effort. There’s probably lads that played for him would not have had the same opinion as me.”
Nine points on his debut, an Allstar nomination, an All-Ireland quarter-final, Martin Dunne’s time in a Cavan jersey was meteoric.
Just over two years after making his debut, having made just two late substitute appearances in championship beyond that first summer, it was over.
Terry Hyland left at the end of 2016, replaced by Mattie McGleenan. Dunne saw the door potentially reopening.
He’d just arrived home one evening when his phone started to blow up with calls and messages. In an interview, McGleenan had hinted at a return for the Cavan Gaels forward.
“I’ve never, ever spoken to Mattie McGleenan. I don’t know where that came out of.
“I’ve never seen that interview, it came out somewhere because that night I came home, I was going ‘what is going on here?’ I ended up turning the phone off. “If I had’ve been asked at that time, being honest with you, I probably would have went with the attitude of right, I’m gonna f***ing show this is why I should have been playing.
“If I had got asked, I probably would have… Definitely would have.”
But the call never came. The next time it was brought up was when his cousin Mickey Graham took over at the end of 2018. It had been five years since Dunne had started a championship game for Cavan by then. Too long.
“Growing up, Mickey was one of my best friends. Whatever he was doing, I was trying to copy him. He’d tell you himself he wasn’t the most prolific scorer but he was a very, very good player. He’s someone I’d look up to massively.
“When he got the job, he dropped me a text and said ‘you may get the boots back out’. I just said that ship has sailed.
“I’ve that much respect for him, I would never fall out with him, never. I just wouldn’t want to be giving him headaches, why am I not playing or that.”
Martin Dunne’s inter-county career can be distilled neatly into two afternoons spent with Armagh.
The one where he kicked nine points and the one where he didn’t get the chance.