By Brian Murphy

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“Today’s my birthday,” Seán Cavanagh announces, unprompted, at the launch of the EirGrid All-Ireland U21 Championship in Croke Park on Tuesday. “But I won’t do a Yaya Touré on it,” he adds in reference to the Manchester City midfielder who threatened to leave the club in 2014 when he felt City failed to mark his birthday appropriately.

Whether Tyrone GAA presented him with a 100kg cake at training last night or his 33rd birthday slipped by unrecognised, Cavanagh will carry on as he has done for what seems like forever, his county’s longest and most loyal servant.

His 33rd birthday is, perhaps, a fitting occasion, then, to reflect on one of the most remarkable careers in the modern history of the GAA.

Having made his Tyrone debut in 2002, Cavanagh has been involved with the Tyrone senior team for 15 years. His next championship appearance for Tyrone this summer will be his 80th and will grant him access to an exclusive and elite club of GAA all-time greats.

He has outlasted all those who have played for Tyrone throughout the Mickey Harte era; in fact he is around even longer than his irrepressible manager, who took over in 2003.

It goes without saying that he is the oldest member of the current Tyrone squad, though Joe McMahon, who made his debut in 2004, also turns 33 in August. 

His longevity aside, what marks Cavanagh out as unique in the modern era of total commitment is the fact that he has kept going with Tyrone while maintaining a demanding career as an accountant and raising a young family.  

At the end of every season, he sits back and assesses his circumstances and considers whether he has it in him to go again; whether he has it in him to commit to being an absent father to his two young daughters for the next nine months.  

Invariably, the side of him that still loves the game wins out, and of course there is the tantalising prospect of winning a fourth All-Ireland title with a Tyrone side Harte has reconstructed for the second time in Cavanagh’s career, the latest incarnation brimming with young talent. 

“It definitely is easier when you look around you and see brilliant footballers, and it probably is like the third team I have been involved in,” Cavanagh says.

“The first one was the Canavans and the Doohers and Chris Lawns and guys like that. Cormac McAnallen.

“The mid-2000s of the Philip Jordans and the Stephen O’Neills and all that era.

“Now all those guys are gone and we have the Mattie Donnellys and Peter Hartes driving the team on.

“I’ve been lucky enough to see three new Tyrone teams but this one definitely has the ability to emulate some of those former teams.

They may have had their differences of opinion in the past, but the warmth with which Cavanagh speaks of Mickey Harte is genuine.

Cavanagh played under Art McRory and Eugene McKenna in 2002, but that season aside, Harte’s is the only voice he has ever had guiding him throughout his senior inter-county career.

Harte built two great Tyrone sides, with Cavanagh to the fore in each of them, winning All-Ireland titles in 2003, ’05 and ’08, but to come back for more with yet another new side bears all the hallmarks only the great managers carry.  

 

“The one thing about Mickey is that he has always kept that utmost respect from the players,” Cavanagh says, when asked how his manager has remained relevant and kept him motivated over the last 15 years.

“I think that maybe you can play at club level under managers and maybe they need rotating in that the players maybe lose a bit of respect for them, get a bit tired of listening to the same voice.

“To be honest, I am still listening to Mickey Harte, still learning from Mickey Harte. That’s the best compliment I can pay to him, that he is always looking ahead and he will always find a way to motivate you.

“That, in my opinion, is one of his greatest attributes. He is still doing that, he is still doing new things and every day we go out he has the full respect and full attention of all the group. He’s done that for 15, 16 years so I think that’s a great sign.”

Talk of another great Harte-managed Tyrone side has been fuelled by last year’s All-Ireland U21 success and by the senior side’s surprise run to the All-Ireland semi-final, when they ran Kerry close.

There were a couple of years, however, before the green shoots started to sprout, when there was plenty of pressure from within the county for Harte to pass the mantle on to someone else.

“You can’t ignore (that) we haven’t won Ulster for four or five years, and for a county that has been used to a bit of success for the last 20 years, as a group we would acknowledge that we need to get back to the top table in terms of winning Ulsters and what not,” Cavanagh says.

“There always was going to be that changing from the second team to a third team took a few years and we went through a right few players. I think we are building nicely now and we have settled and an awful lot of players came on the scene last year and this is now their second year.

“We have a few even newer faces and I think we have a very positive group at the moment.”

Much of that positivity stems from their unexpectedly strong performances last summer. Asked how he felt after the 1-16 to 1-11 All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Kerry in August, Cavanagh is clear, however.   

“There's no such thing as 'we did well, we got to an All-Ireland semi-final'. It was a gutting defeat because we felt we had the potential to go to a final and whether we won or not, nobody will know but at the same time we thought we had enough talent on that pitch that day to beat Kerry,” he says.

“Maybe they had a wee bit more guile and cuteness at key moments in the game that saw them over the line. You have to feel that if we want to take it to that level, ​then we have to learn from those key moments in that game and build on them this year.”

Cavanagh watched the subsequent All-Ireland final between Kerry and Dublin and Kerry in the company of Mayo’s Aidan O’Shea in an executive box at Croke Park.  

“Both of us were looking thinking it could have been so much different,” he says. “But you watch the game and were sort of thinking I wonder if we had set up a wee bit different to Kerry, would we have put more pressure on Dublin but you have to give Dublin credit.

“They managed that game very well and they always looked like winning that game. You'll always wonder what if but you were watching on wondering if we maybe would have put them under a bit more pressure than Kerry did on the day. I'm sure there's probably 30 or 31 other counties thinking something similar.”

That may well have been Cavanagh’s last chance to add another All-Ireland medal to his collection. Based on the enthusiasm with which he is approaching his 15th campaign with Tyrone, he is not giving up hope yet.

If anyone deserves the fairytale ending, it’s Seán Cavanagh.

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Seán Cavanagh was speaking at the launch of the 2016 EirGrid GAA Football U21 All-Ireland Championship. Click here for more details.