Nobody has more gristle to chew through this football weekend than Dermot McCabe. It’s bad enough that his Westmeath team has lost three games out of three and are sitting at the bottom of Division Two. Now, with relegation looming, he faces Cavan, the county whose jersey he graced for 17 seasons at senior level.
“Yeah, so what?” says you. Managers facing off against their own nearest and dearest is hardly new. In the past couple of seasons alone, we’ve had Mickey Harte, Gavin Devlin and Paddy Tally manage Derry against Tyrone, we’ve had Davy Burke manage Roscommon against Kildare, we’ve had Ger Brennan take a Louth team to give the Dubs a rattle. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Except, in this case, maybe there is. On top of managing Westmeath, McCabe is actually an employee of the Cavan county board. For the past dozen years, his day job has been head of games in Cavan, overseeing the structures and pathways and grassroots coaching for underage kids across the county. When he goes to work, he goes to his office in Kingspan Breffni Park. That’s an awkward week around the kettle and the custard creams.
Understandably enough, McCabe passed on the offer of an interview for this piece. Hard to blame him. It must be a head-spinning thing, to be fighting for your Division Two life, fighting for your season, while plotting against the county whose long-term fortunes you earn your daily bread trying to improve.
“It’s a difficult position for him,” says Seánie Johnston, who knows whereof he speaks, of course. “Dermot is his own character, a very strong-minded person. But it’s just added to it this week with the situation both teams are in. Every game is important obviously but this is a real four-pointer.
“It’s really win or bust for Westmeath. Obviously Cavan got that win under their belt over Louth last week so that got them a bit of breathing room. That was huge for them, whereas Westmeath seem to have been extremely unlucky in their games not to have any points on the board. They really have to win at the weekend.”
That’s the thing. Technically speaking, the stakes wouldn’t be any lower if Westmeath were playing any of the other Division Two teams this weekend. McCabe’s side have already lost to Louth, Monaghan and Cork. After Sunday, their remaining games are home to a resurgent Meath, away to Down, home to Roscommon, the best team in the division. Winning this weekend is vital, no matter who is in the other dressingroom.
But life is life, at the same time. There’s no point pretending this is Just Another Game, either for Cavan or for McCabe himself. In an ideal world, he’d have welcomed his people to Mullingar this weekend with both sides in mid-table and everyone throwing around a few wry chuckles about it all. This is a knottier scene than that, though.
For one thing, McCabe’s status in Cavan football looms over everything. When the Irish Independent ran a Covid-times feature on each county’s top 20 players of the past 50 years, there was very little argument when they put McCabe at the top of the Cavan poll. Even allowing for the fact that Cavan went on to win their first Ulster title in 23 years that winter, it’s unthinkable that any of the current crop would displace him five years on.
He played from 1994 to 2010, making 132 appearances in total. He scored 16-228 in that time, mostly at midfield and occasionally at full-forward. He won Ulster titles at senior and under-21 level, as well as picking up an All Star in 1997, the only Cavan player to win one between 1978 and 2020. He’s also the only Cavan player ever to have been picked on two International Rules squads and was exceptional in the series win over Australia in 1998.
In his post-playing days, McCabe managed Cavan to their only Ulster minor title of the past 50 years in 2011. He was appointed as Cavan’s games development manager in 2013 and was a selector under Mickey Graham during the senior team’s glorious run through the winter of 2020.
At club level, he has been at the forefront of any success Gowna have had over the past three decades. The club had a single county title to its name before he came along – of the eight they’ve won since, McCabe played on six of those teams in the 1990s and early 2000s and co-managed the most recent two in 2022 and 2023.
Long story short, there will be very few – if any – players in the Cavan 26 to face Westmeath who haven’t shared a dressingroom with McCabe, been through his hands as a coach or at the very least played against one of his Gowna teams. His knowledge of their habits and foibles will be forensic, his capacity for being surprised by anything they do will be slim.
All of which makes Westmeath one of the least attractive places for Raymond Galligan and his Cavan side to have to go this weekend. Even by the standards of Division Two, where every game is a coin-flip, needing a result against a team managed by someone with such detailed knowledge of your team is hardly ideal.
“Cavan badly needed the bit of luck with the goal off the kick-out against Louth last week,” says Johnston. “There was a downer around the whole of the county after the first couple of weeks of the league. There was a real fear of going back down to Division Three and losing the Sam Maguire status.
“So getting that win gives you back a bit of momentum and now you’re going down to play the team below you. If Cavan win, they’re not safe but it goes a long way. Cavan people have good memories – in 2016, we lost their first two games in Division Two but turned it around to win five games on the bounce to get promoted. You just don’t know where momentum can bring you.”
Unspoken in all of this is the existential threat in Cavan’s particular circumstances right now. There’s no avoiding the fact that Galligan’s team is beginning to grow old together. The win over Louth last Sunday was ground out through experience as much as anything.
Their top scorers were Gearóid McKiernan (34), Jason McLoughlin (32), Dara McVeety (31) and Conor Madden (31). Throw in Pádraig Faulkner and Killian Clarke (both 31), as well as Ciarán Brady and Gerard Smith (both 30) and you have the rump of a team with more years behind it than ahead of it.
By itself, that doesn’t have to be disastrous, obviously. Lots of teams would be looking on with envy at having that amount of experience around the place – not least the Westmeath dressingroom, which has seen John Heslin, James Dolan, Andy McCormack, Kevin Maguire and Ronan O’Toole walk out the door in the past six months alone. But much as McCabe wouldn’t admit it, losing all those heavy-hitters has to buy him a measure of grace and leeway.
Galligan has no such luxury. If Cavan are relegated, he surely won’t have all the over-30 gang back for next year. A summer in the Tailteann Cup isn’t what McKiernan came back for after his year out in 2024 and with Paddy Lynch’s return from an ACL injury going slower than hoped, there is a real worry that the whole operation is in a delicate place just now.
Feeding that worry is the fact that Cavan have done very little of note at underage level for the past decade. Having been the kings of the Ulster under-21 scene in the early 2010s, they’ve made just one Ulster final at that grade since 2014. At minor level, they’ve been to two Ulster finals since that 2011 title and lost them both. On the schools scene, St Pat’s Cavan have been to one MacRory Cup final since the 1970s, winning it in 2015. But otherwise, the cupboard is pretty bare.
All of which informs the fact that plenty of eyebrows were raised when McCabe was appointed as Westmeath manager last October. It wasn’t that people expected him to sit around waiting for vacancy to arise if and when Galligan’s time in the Cavan job is done, more that it felt like an incredibly difficult circle for anyone to square.
When part of your job is cultivating the next crop of Cavan footballers – and the next one, and the one after that – managing another county seems like it would bring a world of unnecessary hassle down upon you. Especially since everyone knew that Cavan and Westmeath would be facing off this spring and that they’d likely be scrapping over the same patch of Division Two land. It’s counterintuitive at best – and there’s plenty in Cavan who have less printable terms for it.
But McCabe has never been anything but his own man. Anyone who has worked with him cites a restless football brain and a headstrong leadership style. Many Cavan footballers from down the years would baulk at managing against their own county. McCabe was the best of them and still he took the Westmeath job knowing it was on the cards. Everybody gets to make their own way in the world.
“At least it’s not in Breffni,” says Johnston, who famously made his Kildare debut against his former (and future) Cavan team-mates in a 2012 qualifier down in the big bowl on the edge of Cavan town. “He’s luckier than I was!”
Nothing new under the sun. McCabe will be glad to get the weekend over, all the same.
