Allianz National Football League
CAVAN laid a few ghosts to rest when overcoming one bogey side last weekend, and Conor Moynagh is hoping they can break another hoodoo against Tyrone tomorrow night.
The Breffnimen haven’t beaten the Red Hands in League or Championship since 1983, and have lost five from six since 2016 – including last summer’s All-Ireland Qualifier defeat in Enniskillen.
Cavan have had a similarly poor recent record against Roscommon, losing six and drawing one of their seven meetings during the last five years.
However, that ended in emphatic style last Sunday as Mickey Graham’s men swept to victory over the Rossies.
And Moynagh has dismissed any notion that the Breffni Blues would be carrying mental scars into tomorrow’s clash with Tyrone.
“In 2016 alone we played them five times between the McKenna Cup, the League, the League final, the Ulster semi-final and the replay,” said the 25-year-old.
“Personally we know the lads quite well both on and off the pitch because we’re just sick of looking at each other; they’re good lads to be fair.
“But the same could have been said about a mental block against Roscommon. We played them a lot of times - they’ve been kind of following the same path as us up and down for the last few years, they were in Division Three with us a few years ago so it really has been the same kind of trajectory that both teams have taken.
“It would’ve been said that they had the hold over us, and there was a mental block there that Cavan couldn’t beat them. We disproved that last weekend.
“This is a new management team, we’ve got a lot of fresh blood in the 36 and the lads are really driving on. Inside the camp we’re not looking at it as a mental block.”
That win over Roscommon was a welcome boost to Cavan’s hopes of Division One survival, leaving them in the bottom two alongside neighbours Monaghan – who they play on March 16 – and a point off the Rossies and the Red Hands.
End their winless run against Tyrone tomorrow and they would put themselves in a great position, though Moynagh insists feet have stayed firmly on the ground since the Roscommon game.
And any talk of Cavan’s new-found attacking approach, after scoring 3-13 last weekend, should also be viewed in context too says the Drumgoon man.
“To be fair, Mickey and the management team there have brought in a different style to how we’ve been playing. We probably are a wee bit more positive, we get our heads up a bit earlier, but this ‘new attacking Cavan’ thing, it was the same last year, the same the year before.
“People forget that when we got promoted in 2016 under Terry [Hyland], we had the best score difference out of all four divisions. You can see Terry’s doing the same with Leitrim there.
“Mickey and the team have brought in a style of play the players are really enjoying. You could see that even when results weren’t going our way, and those plans and strategies are starting to come to fruition.
“[Before the Roscommon game] we looked back on every game we played, and felt we were moving in the right direction. There were good parts of our games and then we’d just drop off.
“With each game we learned about what we did wrong previously and tried to pull that into the next game. That win was an accumulation of us learning from our previous games, and potentially Roscommon just having an off day.
“We did play well in parts, our game-plan went the way we expected it, but we’re not getting too carried away.”
