Seán Cavanagh (born 16 February 1983) is an Irish former Gaelic footballer who played for the Moy Tír Na nÓg club and for the Tyrone county team.
His playing style was very attack-minded, considering he is usually deployed as a midfielder like the doc himself, and he usually ended up scoring more than most of the forwards on the team.
[citation needed] He was also enormously successful as school level, winning the Ulster Colleges Championship, the MacRory Cup[7] in 2000, with Saint Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh, earning himself an Ulster Colleges All Star along the way, having scored the decisive goal in the final.
[9] He returned from injury to appear in the drawn Ulster Final against Down, and scored a point in the replay while commanding midfield.
There was speculation as to whether he would emigrate to Australia to join a professional AFL team, (Brisbane Lions), as Tadhg Kennelly had successfully done a few years prior.
[16] Cavanagh was again awarded an All-Star, his third in a row – the only Ulsterman to do that apart from Peter Canavan in the mid 1990s, and the first midfielder to do it since Jack O'Shea in the early 1980s.
[17] In the 2007 Championship, Cavanagh struck up an effective midfield partnership with Kevin Hughes, and undertook some free kick duties in the absence of Tyrone's regular free-takes due to injury.
In the All-Ireland quarter final, Cavanagh scored a spectacular solo-effort goal against Meath, but was unable to inspire Tyrone to victory and they crashed out of the Championship.
In the 2013 Championship, Joe Brolly subjected Cavanagh to a ferocious on-air tirade after he received the man of the match award for helping Tyrone to an All-Ireland quarter-final victory over Monaghan at Croke Park.
[22][23] Cavanagh represented Ireland several times in the International Rules Series, and was chosen to play for them for the unsuccessful 2005 and 2006 campaigns.