Seanie Johnston firmly back in the Cavan fold

The question hangs there, a bubble of awkwardness suspended in midair for Seánie Johnston to either pop or leave alone.

We're talking about the last time he played a championship match for Cavan, a qualifier defeat to Longford away back in June 2011. Johnston was 26 at the time, eight years on from his debut near enough to the day.

If he could go back and talk to that guy now, what would he say to him? Would he tell him to maybe stick at it?

“It’s a good question,” he says, finally.

“I don’t know what I’d want to say to it. I think I’m not even going to answer it, actually. Because it’s a very poisoned chalice, whatever way I answer it. It’s a good question though – I might answer it again for you whenever I finish up.”

It’s a thoroughly unfair question, of course. Hypothetical and ultimately pointless. But his reluctance to explore it is, obviously, telling to a certain extent. Whatever he does, however well or otherwise his second life with Cavan turns out, he will always be Seánie Johnston, the guy who went to Kildare.

Unfounded certainty

He knows that too, of course. Knew it a long time ago. Resigned himself to it, dealt with it, moved on from it. Spent some time wishing that people would come and ask him about it rather than yakking amongst themselves with unfounded certainty but eventually realised that was pointless too.

If he hadn’t long since let go of trying to change people’s minds, life would be torture.

Yet here he is again, the one place just about everyone presumed he'd never be. Back in a blue jersey, heading out of the tunnel in Breffni Park for an Ulster Championship match. It always felt like too much poison had seeped into the well, that he and they had moved on. If only in the interests of a quiet life, it was presumed Johnston wouldn't have fancied a comeback.

Not so. He wanted back and he wanted it badly. Indeed, The Irish Times understands that it was him who made the initial approach to the Cavan management rather than the other way around. Much as he hoped it might happen, the honest truth is that he didn't imagine it would.

“No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t say that I had made peace with the fact that it wouldn’t come around but in my own head, I was thinking that the chance was probably gone. Years become more important from a football point of view the older you get and there were a couple of years there where it didn’t come around so I wouldn’t have been saying to myself that it wasn’t going to happen. I’m just delighted that it did.

“I wasn’t really thinking about what outsiders would think. I was thinking about contributing. I probably in my subconscious alright would have thought that it if I did well, things would be okay and if I didn’t, things would probably get worse. It was just about being able to help in any which way. If you’re playing well, there’s no problems. If you’re not, then things will probably kick up again.

A risk

“But that’s the risk you take in life. It probably would have been easier not to go back and just to move on with life and live your life. But you take a risk with anything you do. It could have gone terribly. Cavan could have lost seven games in the league.

“It was looking like a completely different season after two games. My first game, we were down seven points at half-time and you’d be thinking that things were looking dodgy at that point. But in fairness to the lads, we pulled it out of the fire that day and things have gone well since.”

The chance came around in the middle of December last year. He met Terry Hyland for a chat the week before Christmas and they talked about what he might be able to bring. They talked a lot about positivity, about the sort of person he was going to be in the set-up.

Johnston was coming back from an ankle injury and knew there was no guarantee he’d be at concert pitch straight away. So he made it clear that if all he could do was be there and give advice to younger players, then so be it. No dice, said Hyland. Come back as a footballer, come back and contribute.

“There’s no point saying I wasn’t nervous meeting the lads again. It’s like any time you go and do something out of your comfort zone. There’s trepidation and things are difficult out of your comfort zone. But I went in and I suppose what made it easier was we went on a night out together around the 23rd of December. After that, it was 100 per cent. We sat around slagging each other and I got to talk to a lot of the lads again and after that it was fine. It’s been good ever since.”

Nothing stands still. The Cavan team he left was, rightly or very often wrongly, the Seánie show. He played like a guy convinced that if he didn’t score a hatful, there was no point being there. He was one of those players who’d shoot from anywhere and just when you were giving him the bird for it, would land one from the endline on an impossible angle. Cavan are different now. If anyone has licence to shoot on sight, it’s more likely to be Gearóid McKiernan. Johnston is a worker bee, albeit that it hasn’t come totally naturally to him.

At ease

“It probably hits your ego, does it?” he wonders aloud. “It does a bit I suppose. But I’m fine with it. I’m completely at ease with where I’m at in my career. I’m delighted to have got this opportunity to play again. I’d like to think I would have been okay with it back then as well but there are probably a lot of people who’d say the opposite.

“I just want Cavan to win. If that involves me playing for 70 minutes or for 10 minutes, scoring 10 points or scoring no points, that’s what it is. As long as Cavan win, that’s all that matters.

“It’s how can I contribute. I realise now that it’s not just on scoring. It’s being a positive influence, being a provider, setting up scores, working hard as a team, getting more tackles in, getting turnovers up the field. There’s so much more to it now that scoring. I probably did put pressure on myself early on in my career, maybe I felt I had to score six, seven, eight points a game. There are better players than me in there now and they’re doing most of the scoring. If I can get them the ball, I’m happy enough.”

The league went better than he could have imagined. He was exceptional in the second half against Meath, when Cavan turned their spring around (and Meath’s too, which didn’t hurt his popularity). He started scoring goals, which he’d never really done in his previous life. In a couple of games, he was substituted late on and given genuinely warm ovations from the Cavan support. He wasn’t sure how something like that would go and as much as he tried to ignore it, he’s only human.

“I’m not sitting here saying I wasn’t thinking about those things either. You’d want to have a heart of stone not to wonder what people would make of it. But it comes back to the control factor. I’m not in the stand, I can’t control what’s said there. All I can do is concentrate on being the best I can be.

External factors

“That control thing is key – if someone wants to shout or roar, I can’t do anything about it. Obviously, I wish I could. But there’s no point. You can’t please everyone no matter what you do in life. It’s hard to fully buy into it, the idea of only being able to control the controllables.

“But I think if you didn’t, you’d go mad. You wouldn’t even be able to focus on the game because you would just be thinking about external factors.

“Of course it’s difficult when you’re going into it but the reality was different. There was nothing at all bad that I could hear, which was great.”

So here he is, moving well and putting himself out there again. Whatever you think about the path he chose five years ago, it’s a ballsy move. Hard not to admire him for it.