Seán Cavanagh still firmly committed to Tyrone’s cause

The commitment, he says, has gone “completely mental”, and at 33 he’s probably past his prime, and still Seán Cavanagh can’t find a single reason not to continue for what will be his 16th season as a Tyrone footballer.

What else would he be doing with his evenings and weekends?

“There was nothing telling me not to go back, that’s probably the best way of putting it,” says Cavanagh, who also admits to harbouring a certain fear of walking away, whenever that may be.

What will he do then?

“The commitment is mental, completely mental, but at the same time if you didn’t want to do it you wouldn’t do it. You do get hooked on that feeling of trying to make yourself better, and look, I love every minute of it.

“I took a couple of months to think about it, and during those couple of months, all I could think about was going back. I’m in reasonable condition, injury wise, and I had a chat with the family and the wife seemed to be happy enough to push me out to get fed somewhere else.

“The way I look at it, if you weren’t in the gym or doing something like that you’d probably be playing five-a-side with friends or playing basketball or whatever.

“And I remember guys that retired in 2002, ’04 or ’07, and we went on and won All-Irelands the following year, and I thought it would be too much of a risk almost. I’m wise enough, and the fact that we have really good team probably makes it harder to walk away because we probably do see ourselves in that top bracket at the moment.”

Indeed there is that sense of unfinished business; after winning a first Ulster title since 2010, the one-point All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Mayo, not helped by Cavanagh’s sending off with 10 minutes to go, still rankles.

Had Tyrone gone on to win the All-Ireland he might well have retired, but for now he’s ready to embrace 2017, and “will be surprised if we don’t compete at the top end of it”.

Winter training

Cavanagh admits he’s actually back at it already, presumably not flouting the GAA’s collective winter training ban (with Tyrone not “due” back until December 8th), but says he’s already training twice a week, with another night in the gym.

“Everybody keeps telling me we’re in the off-season. Last week I was training with Tyrone Tuesday and Thursday, I was in the gym with Tyrone on Wednesday, in the gym with the Moy on Friday and doing my own stuff.

“And I did a couple of things at the weekend as well, forest park runs and things. That’s the off-season. you compare it with the soccer guys or rugby guys or whatever, I’d say it compares right and favourably. I’m trying to work out how [Wayne] Rooney has the time to go on the rip because you don’t really have that many days to recover from a hangover.”

At age 33, that training doesn’t get any easier either, although every Tyrone training session is now measured (top speed, average speed, total distance covered) and Cavanagh still compares favourably with his younger team-mates:

“If I was continually at the wrong end of the scale I think you would be asking yourself questions, whether you are right to continue to play at this level, and whether you can still compete at this level.”

Cavanagh was speaking at the launch of the GAA’s membership rewards card entitled grma or ‘go raibh maith agat’, available from January.

One thing he’s not looking forward to in 2017 however is the introduction of the mark, which he reckons may actually make for a scrappier game around midfield, rather than have the opposite effect.

“I played with the mark, in International Rulers, and it’s difficult to officiate, not as simple as someone saying, ‘yeah, you can catch the ball freely’. To me it adds just another layer of complication and, in my mind, we need two referees because one referee isn’t enough to cope with everything that is going on in our game at this moment.

“And to add another difficult to interpret rule to that, there’s going to be an awful lot of mistakes made, an awful lot of learning on both sides for the referees and the players.

The mark

“Probably the most disappointing thing is that I’m not even sure if players are behind the mark. To me, it is going to cause an awful lot of confusion and it is going to change the face of our games next year.

“It’s just going to make players look to break the ball more and more, and that’s just going to make the game scrappier. I’m at a loss as to how exactly it is all going to play out, but it does frighten me to a certain extent, because it is a pretty significant change, and there may be as many negatives as there will be positives.”

Cavanagh also remains chiefly supportive of Tyrone team-mate Cathal McCarron, whose controversial book outlines his gambling addiction and also how an encounter with a teenager on Tinder resulted in a police investigation, after it transpired the girl was only 15.

“Cathal will openly admit that he has a tough life, he has had a tough time at home, tough time on the football field and with the gambling. He deserves credit to come out and be honest with everything that has gone wrong in his life and he is trying to put it right now.

“I was glad to see him back. You have to admire that, because all of us have our skeletons and none of us will tell of many of them.”