Not too far away. Getting there. Need a bit of luck. Few teams have been as sinned against in the championship over the past five years as Cavan, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

IN A way, nothing became the Val Andrews era in Cavan so much as the ending of it. A home defeat to Antrim last month during which they actually scored more times than the visitors, but still ended up losing by 0-12 to 4-6. A players’ meeting two nights later in Virginia to clear the air at which there was plenty of grumbling about the set-up but not – repeat, not – a vote for regime change.

A phone call afterwards in which the team captain said one thing and the county chairman heard another. A subsequent phone call from the chairman to Andrews telling him the players had voted for his removal when it hadn’t happened. Recrimination, angst, chaos. The end.

Oh, and in the middle of it all, the under-21s went out and beat Tyrone to take their second Ulster title in a row. They did so with a team that will still have 10 players underage next year. It wouldn’t be Cavan if there wasn’t some faint vestige of hope in the mix.

“There hasn’t been much success the last few years so the Cavan public have had no choice but to be patient,” says Michael Hannon, the shut-down corner-back who was a fixture in the side for much of the last decade. “We don’t play a lot of hurling, we don’t play rugby, we don’t really play soccer, we play basketball only sporadically.

“Gaelic football is what everybody looks at and plays so there’s expectation on the back of that. Everyone expects at least one good day every summer.”

Hard to see where they’ll find one this year.

As under-21 manager Terry Hyland has been promoted to the top job with a four-year mandate; the emphasis will have to be on walking before anyone runs.

Andrews was a faithful officer working an unforgiving beat and even though there was no vote in Virginia, the plausibility of the notion that there might have been was enough for him to take his leave. Like Tom Carr before him, he ran into a dressingroom where there was an obsession with icing even though the cake lacked a certain substance.

Players who could rhyme off their body-fat ratio struggled with a 30-yard foot pass and didn’t very much appreciate it being pointed out. There was talent in the group, just not maybe as much as the group thought there was.

Relations were undeniably bad between players and management by the end of the league and even if Andrews had survived the championship, very few expected him to survive the year.

The Seanie Johnston wrangle wasn’t the only one that ended with players gone off the panel. Cootehill’s John McCutcheon is back in the side for tomorrow but only because Hyland recalled him after he quit the panel in early spring over a lack of game time.

James Reilly is in goal but only after Cavan played much of the league with a forward – last year’s county intermediate player of the year Keith Fannin – between the sticks because the original substitute goalkeeper Fintan Reilly also walked out.

Thing is, there’s always been flux and ferment in the Cavan panel in recent years. With five players being handed their championship debut tomorrow – including corner-forward Jack Brady who hasn’t yet played a league game for the county – they’re now up to a scarcely believable 72 championship debuts in 12 seasons. All teams regenerate year on year but not to the tune of six brand new faces every summer. It comes from a restlessness, a constant itch that’s never scratched in a county with success in the family tree. Problem is, that success is in the distant outer rings at this stage.

“When Eamon Coleman was over us,” says Hannon, “he had that mentality that we were going to win Ulster. You grew accustomed to it. Maybe as you got older, you became a wee bit more cynical. The benefit of being young is that you haven’t developed that yet and you do believe you can get there.

“We played Tyrone in 2005 and we nearly had them beat off the park but they came back and got a draw against us and went on to win the All-Ireland that year. I definitely think Eamon getting sick in his second year was such a huge blow to us. He was building something there at that time. We weren’t too far away from making a breakthrough.”

It’s a constant refrain. Not too far away. Getting there. In need of a bit of luck. Few teams have been as sinned against in the championship over the past five years as Cavan. In 2007, they had Down beaten but a late Ronan Murtagh point nabbed them and Down took the replay.

The following year, Kildare mugged them on the line in Newbridge with a James Kavanagh goal in the 72nd minute. Another late goal – this time from Fermanagh’s Ryan Carson – knocked them out of Ulster in 2010 and last year they were the only team to score a goal against Donegal even after having Ray Cullivan sent off just eight minutes in.

It would make for grim reading all round if the underage success didn’t provide a chink of light. Two Ulster Under-21 titles in a row plus last year’s minor title points to a brighter dawn at some stage, they just don’t know when. As far as Hannon is concerned, the worst thing that could happen is for the future to be insisted upon in the here and now.

“My own view would be that there’s some outstanding players coming through but they’re a good bit away yet. Looking at the minor and under-21 teams last year I actually would have thought there was more senior intercounty potential in the minor team than in the under-21 team. Last year’s minor team has I’d say seven or eight players who have a real chance of making it at senior level whereas the under-21 team has probably five. People need to temper their expectations and hope they come through over the next three years or so rather than thinking it’s going to happen straight away.

“It used to be that a good under-21 was well able to play intercounty football and well able to succeed. That’s not the case anymore with the way strength and conditioning has gone. Tactics are more defensive and it’s all about breaking tackles now. So the way the game has changed, you can’t expect a good crop of under-21s to make their mark straight away.

“They need to be 23 or 24 before they can make an impact. Somebody like Gearóid McKiernan can fill out in just a year because he’s a great athlete but in general they need a bit more time.”

McKiernan has been out with ankle ligament trouble since a careless defeat against Offaly in the league and his return as the heartbeat of the Cavan side is vital if they’re to find any traction against Donegal tomorrow.

The game between these two teams was bitty and niggly last year and yet even though Michael Murphy was sent off in the first half, Donegal still walked away with a nine-point victory, their biggest of the summer. Hyland’s side have shown little to convince that a similar fate doesn’t await them this time around.

The future may well be bright for Cavan.

But few would argue that the present has much to recommend it.