TERRY HYLAND made Raymond Galligan an offer he could have easily refused. Third-choice goalkeeper was the deal.
For the Lacken clubman, there was one sticking point. He was a full-forward - not a goalkeeper. Galligan had been knocking around the Cavan senior set-up for a half-dozen years.
A sure-footed free-taker, he’d some good moments in the Cavan forward line, but he could never quite nail down a regular place in the team. Hyland first floated the idea when he wandered into the bar Galligan was leasing a few years back.
“I was playing full-forward in the McKenna Cup and the league and, at the end of 2012, I took over the bar,” says Galligan.
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“I wasn’t going to go back in with Cavan because of the bar. And I remember Terry coming in and saying: ‘You know, you’d make a great goalie. You’ve a great kick.’ I used to laugh at him because I’d never played goals in my life.”
Hyland, though, was on to something: “The thing is, Raymond is a free-taker,” says Hyland, who stepped down as Cavan boss at the end of this season.
“He would have scored 11 points in a league game against Roscommon back in Tommy Carr’s time in charge. Kick-outs are such a big part of the game nowadays. Most goalkeepers, especially in front of good defensive set-ups, make maybe two saves per game, three maximum while, at the same time, he would have 25 to 30 kick-outs. So which is going to have the biggest influence on a game?"
Hyland adds: “Shot-stopping wouldn’t be as big a thing as it was 20-years-ago because of the way the game has gone. So a goalkeeper is not as exposed to one-on-one situations.
“You can protect a goalkeeper and you can work on their shot-stopping. We got Gary Rodgers [Dundalk and Republic of Ireland international goalkeeper] to work with him over the last few years. So we worked mainly on his placed kick-outs.”
Despite everybody telling him he was wasting his time with the county set-up, the prospect of playing third fiddle to Conor Gilsenan and James Farrelly didn’t discourage Galligan.
“I would go back to the club and play full-forward and I would get abuse fired at me, saying: ‘You’re wasting your time and you’ll never make it’. Gary Rodgers was our goalkeeping coach and he always kept telling me to work on my technique and my footwork and the shot-stopping end of things and I had the advantage with the frees and the kick-outs. I wanted to stick at it rather than quit - I didn’t want to give up on it."
Galligan winces at the memory of Cavan’s pre-season training in late 2014: “That year, we trained from October to January and we ran and ran and ran,” he says.
“I remember Terry brought me in for a meeting and he knew I was serious because he had run the sh*t out of me for three months. I think he knew after that that I wanted to play for Cavan. He told me he would give me a chance between the league and the Championship - and he stuck by that.”
Hyland, also a Lacken clubman, recalls that pre-season: “I would have trained Raymond at his club many, many years ago and he wouldn’t be fond of running!
“He was our third choice ‘keeper with Cavan. We went to the States and played a few challenge matches and he did really well. So we thought more seriously about him coming into Championship and his kick-out strategy would have been something the opposition hadn’t seen.”
Gilsenan was Hyland’s first-choice ‘keeper throughout Cavan’s 2015 NFL campaign and he was named to start in the match programme against Monaghan at Kingspan Breffni Park.
However, wearing number 16, Galligan had done sufficiently well in a series of challenge games to get his chance: “I suppose the kick-outs and finding men was down to myself, really. I watched other ‘keepers and put my own twist on it.
“The way the game has evolved over the last two or three years, it kind of worked out for me in that regard as there is far more emphasis on possession football, rather than just lumping the ball up the field.
“The Championship game against Monaghan was definitely daunting,” the 29-year-old says.
“I was nervous. I would kind of back myself with kick-outs, but I was afraid of my shot-stopping, even though I did a lot of training - six or seven months - but I kept a clean sheet that day and my kick-out rate was up in the 90s. That’s what kept me in the next day. It just went well for me. We probably should have beaten Monaghan that day - we were four points up with 13 minutes to go.”
Presented with the choice of playing full-forward for Lacken or keeping goal for Cavan, Galligan would pick outfield every time: “I’d take full-forward because I’d rather be kicking the ball in the net than lifting the ball out of it!
“I’m playing full-forward for my club and playing okay but, the way the game has evolved, my [lack of] speed would go against me [at inter-county level], especially Cavan being a Division One team now, I have to be realistic. I have a good opportunity to start every day. I’m happy to play in goals for the county and play as much for my club at full-forward and keep my sharpness up.”
During his relatively brief time in goal, Galligan has been a diligent student of the art of goalkeeping. He ranks Dublin’s Stephen Cluxton and Tyrone’s Niall Morgan as among the best in the country.
“The fact that there’s more emphasis on retaining possession, the ‘keeper has to work a little bit harder, on and off the field," he says.
“You’re probably more important of a player nowadays than a few years ago. I’m not sure it’s extra pressure, players just have to work far harder on their game now than just being a good shot-stopper. The likes of Niall Morgan and Stephen Cluxton have shown over the last few years that they have the right balance in their game.
“And knowing the fact that inter-county players have a seriously high standard of athleticism, it’s more down to finding the weaknesses of other teams and that’s where the video analysis comes from because everybody’s in and around the same level - maybe Dublin seem to have that extra gear - but there’s more emphasis on finding weaknesses and finding mismatches and, even for kick-outs, they can be the difference in getting an extra point or two.”
Galligan’s performance graph was so impressive this year, he won his first Irish News Allstar award, beating Niall Morgan by a handful of votes. The Lacken ace produced a near-flawless performance in Cavan’s fine win over Armagh in the Ulster Championship.
In their first Ulster semi-final game against Tyrone, his inch-perfect kick-out deliveries posed Mickey Harte’s men all sorts of problems. After losing the replay a fortnight later, Cavan got back on the saddle against Carlow, before losing an epic encounter to Derry.
Fergal Flanagan’s first-half sending-off sorely curtailed Cavan’s prospects: “Against Derry, the sending-off was massive,” Galligan acknowledges.
“We kind of ran out of legs, I felt. We were playing against the wind, but Derry were also able to push up on our kick-outs… Losing to Derry was the big regret of the year, especially when you look at what Tipperary did.
“It was a summer of what-ifs. I felt we left it behind us. If we had beaten Derry, who knows what would have happened. We lost to Tyrone in Ulster, but Tyrone were maybe just a wee step ahead of us in regards to their transition.”
With Hyland stepping down after four and-a-half years in charge of the Cavan seniors, former players Deremot McCabe and Peter Reilly have been linked to the vacancy.
Hyland leaves the Breffni men in good shape however - and Galligan is thankful to his club-mate for reinventing him at inter-county level: “Terry gave me a real good opportunity,” says the Lacken man, who now works as a social worker in Dublin.
“He’s a winner and he started Cavan’s success at U21 level. He was the man that set the template. At one point, we were so close to going to Division Four and now we’re in Division One.
“Every year, he brought us to another level and playing Division One football was our goal of a few years ago. So I’m sorry to see him gone. He’s very honest, a real straight shooter. He’s a real players’ manager. I wouldn’t have a bad word to say about Terry.”
Galligan is a glowing parable for perseverance. Not many would have taken Hyland up on his third-choice goalkeeper offer. Galligan did and is now reaping the rewards…
