Mickey Graham believes the defensive style of football adopted by Cavan teams was the reason why many of the four-in-a-row Ulster U21 FC players turned their backs on senior inter-county football.

As reported in this week's Anglo Celt, the new Breffni County boss was speaking at a GAA Questions and Answers evening in Brady's of Arva when a member of the audience asked for his thoughts on research carried out by the newspaper last summer which showed that very few of the 74 players that won provincial U21 medals from 2010 to 2014 subsequently graduated to the senior squad.

"I suppose the first thing was, after U21 level, no more than when I was playing myself, a lot of lads move on and lose the hunger for it and their love of the game," he answered. "Personally I think winning those U21 Ulster Championships were great for Cavan football. We played a very defensive brand of football I believe to win them but it got us success and it was great that it did get us those four Ulster U21 titles. [But] was it enough to push on after that? Personally I don't think so.

"If you look, a lot of the players that we lost in those years were forwards, that's what we lost. I look down through the programmes from those games and those U21 teams were littered with defenders in the forward line.

"You had one or two natural forwards playing in your forward line. I know, talking to one player in particular, I asked him 'what happened? Why do you not want to play football for Cavan?' and he said 'why would I? All they want is defenders, they don't want natural forwards any more'."

He continued: "I just think that lads, especially forwards and midfielders who like to attack, saw that it was something they didn't want to be part of. And no disrespect to those teams who won, it was great, but when they moved on to senior level, Cavan failed to move on with the times and players realised this wasn't happening for them. I think that has a lot to do with it, maybe I'm wrong but that's my personal opinion on it."

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