A pity no study was carried out on the psychological effects of this day 25 years ago on Clare folk
Clare captain Anthony Daly lifts the Liam MacCarthy Cup. All-Ireland Hurling Final, Clare v Offaly, Croke Park, Dublin. Picture credit; SPORTSFILE
Matt the Thresher’s, Birdhill, Co Tipperary. A Wednesday lunchtime in late August 1995. Three young men sitting at a table and discussing the upcoming All-Ireland hurling final.
One of them is there in a journalistic capacity. The other two, Anthony Daly and Johnny Pilkington, are there because they’re the Clare and Offaly captains and they’ll be meeting again in Croke Park a week and a half later. On September 3rd, 25 years ago today.
Oh, and the conversation is being recorded and will appear in print in the on the sabbath before the final. And here’s another Oh: we order a bottle of wine and polish it off between us. Look, the match is still 11 days away…
Sounds beyond bizarre in this era of GPS trackers and WhatsApp player groups and furiously controlled controllables, doesn’t it? Brian Cody would have apoplexy — and not solely Cody either. But the Captains Table was a staple of the big-match build-up back then and no manager found it untoward, even if Eamonn Cregan had insisted the previous year that Martin Hanamy leave Gary Kirby and myself in Hayes’s Hotel in sufficient time to make training that evening.
Matt the Thresher’s was not my first encounter of the 1995 championship with Daly. My memory has me spending what seemed to be half of that summer in Ennis. Staying in Brigid and Noel Pyne’s guesthouse in Clarecastle; sipping coffee in the West County Hotel; sipping not-coffee in Gerry Kelly’s Diamond bar up the street.
One episode stands out: a midday coffee with Daly, who'd nipped out of the bank for a few minutes, the week of the Munster final. He sounded quietly confident. As the West County lunchtime rush began we had to squeeze over at the table to accommodate a family from Limerick on a day trip to Ennis. The man recognised Daly and announced that everyone he knew back home reckoned the following Sunday was a foregone conclusion. He wasn’t bragging, not at all; his tone suggested he realised this was Not A Good Thing. Daly tried not to smirk. A nice piece of tinder for the fire.
My job in Matt the Thresher’s a few weeks later was to throw in the ball and let them shoot the breeze. Predictably Daly was fine value for money. For a larger than life figure Johnny P, on the other hand, was less effusive than I’d anticipated, as if consciously applying a kind of verbal handbrake for fear of letting himself go and saying something that might be used in evidence against him.
Fair enough too, given that he was the man with more to lose. Offaly were the reigning champions, the molten-hot favourites and amid the tropical typhoon of the Leinster final they’d given the performance of the decade. Not merely Offaly’s performance of the decade; performance of the decade.
The Croke Park deluge, far from inhibiting them, brought out every gleaming point of light in their touch game. Kilkenny were deconstructed by 2-16 to 2-5, their two goals late and irrelevant footnotes from DJ Carey. True, Clare had been around the block over the previous couple of seasons (three successive Munster final appearances, one National League final appearance), but the holders were scarcely going to be unseated by a crowd who hadn’t been champions in 81 years, were they?
Few All-Ireland finals cleave to the expected contours and this was not one of the few. We were certain beforehand that for Clare to win they’d have to outgoal their opponents; they didn’t. We asserted loudly that Jamesie O’Connor, their one superstar forward, would be obliged to have the game of his life; he had nothing of the sort. We were adamant that the underdogs would have to play above themselves and in the event they did, or near enough. We were equally categorical that Offaly would have to play below themselves; as it turned out they were tepid beyond belief. From the 2-16 of the Leinster final to 2-8 here, 1-2 of it in the second half.
The obvious explanation is hubris. A more nuanced way of expressing it would be to hold that that particular Offaly outfit, a team of all the gifts, made poor favourites precisely because of the wealth of those gifts. Their sense of self not having been called into question in the manner they felt it had been prior to the Leinster final, the upshot was that they lacked the type of cause that had brought out the compressed and channelled fury of July 17th. In short, they had no beef with Clare.
Far from helping them, indeed, Michael Duignan’s soft goal just before half-time, the result of one of less than a handful of errors Davy Fitz made in his inter-county career, would prove a hindrance. The bell still hadn’t tolled. . RTÉ showed the match during the lockdown. Had I known I’d be writing this piece I’d have watched it from start to finish with pen and notebook. But I did catch those last few minutes of the first half and they were crucial ones.
Duignan finds the net, with Davy beaten by the spin on the sliotar. What happens next? Clare respond with points from Fergal Hegarty and Ger O’Loughlin to go in trailing by two (1-6 to 0-7) instead of four — significant in a white-knuckle affair.
“Davy took a quick puckout and it broke to Jamesie,” O’Loughlin recalls. “He hit it down my wing and I was able to manoeuvre and put it over the bar. It was a good reply to Offaly’s goal and from my point of view it probably kept me on for the second half.”
Calmness reigned in the dressing room at the break. Clare hadn’t been floored by the sucker punch. They had the momentum. They’d be playing with the wind in the second half. “We were confident before the match and even more confident at half-time,” O’Loughlin adds. “After getting the monkey off our backs in the Munster final we brought things to another level in the All Ireland semi-final against Galway. After getting out of one or two tight corners earlier in the season we honestly felt our name was on the MacCarthy Cup.”
They restarted with a Seánie McMahon point from a 65’. Of course they did. Did any team in history win as many 65s and long-range frees as Loughnane’s Clare appeared to? Did any player convert as many of them as McMahon, the king of the intercontinental ballistic missile, appeared to? By a quirk it was Daly, who was feeling good and striking the sliotar well, rather than McMahon who took the free that led to Eamon Taaffe’s winning goal.
Granted, it was no feast for the purists. “A poor enough affair on a damp day that was difficult for hurling,” O’Loughlin acknowledges. One may sniff at the notion of a team winning an All-Ireland by scoring 1-13, as was similarly the case with Wexford 12 months later. But Clare’s 1995 iteration, unlike their descendants of 2013, were never going to triumph by shooting the lights out. It was a different age in so many ways.
If the rising economic tide meant the nation was no longer in need of an infusion of sporting cheer like that provided by Jack Charlton, the menu in Gaelic football had recently served up a slate of novel new items: Down, Donegal, Derry. Clare were the good-news story we hadn’t realised hurling was screaming out for.
Everything about them was new and fresh. The 15 bachelors! The lurid stories of the commando training Mike Mac had put them through during the winter! Yer man the other selector, the cheerful looking lad who liked to sing My Lovely Rose of Clare! Ger Loughnane and the way he might look at you!
If the players were blessed to have Loughnane, simultaneously both Moses and the messiah in the one body, he was equally blessed with them. Daly, Seánie Mac, the Lohans, Michael O’Halloran, Jamesie. They were young and bright and ambitious, smart enough to realise the sacrifices the journey out of the wilderness would entail and not prepared to draw back anywhere along the way. Ideal son in law material off the field, stone-cold killers on it.
The media came to know them better over the next couple of years and they were fantastic fun. Chatty, open, generous with their time, clearly relishing every moment of their new status in life. Things would sour in 1998 but only temporarily; normal relations soon resumed. My contacts book contains far more numbers from the Clare, Offaly and Wexford teams of the 1990s than it does the numbers of players from the last ten years.
In a way, and for various reasons, that’s a pity. A pity too no study was carried out on the psychological effects of this day 25 years ago on Clare folk. How much bouncier was the spring in their step thereafter, how much more joyous the glint in their eye? To put it at its simplest, how much happier did it render them?
Ponder the case of the late Brendan Conway. Brendan, a native of Feakle who’d played for the county during the bad days, had by 1995 been 21 years in Kilkenny as head honcho in the local VEC. He’d known all too many long roads home from Limerick and Thurles, both before moving to Noreside (the Mackey’s Greyhounds horror of 1955 at the Gaelic Grounds, for instance) and after it (the 1977-78 Munster finals).
It changed everything, 1995, utterly and utterly for the better. Clare had at long last taken their place among the hurling nations of the earth and Brendan Conway, no more a member of the jilted generation, at long last felt himself free, then and for the rest of his life, to discuss the sport with his Noreside neighbours as an equal.
“Things that up to then had never been our birthright.”
Brendan and his fellow Bannerites luxuriated through the golden and glorious autumn that followed. Daly got a promotion in work for conferring lustre on the bank. I eventually got a full-time job as hurling correspondent of the . For the record I haven’t been back to Matt the Thresher’s. For old times sake I ought to.
As for Loughnane, the man was only getting started.
