Anthony Daly: Painful Limerick lesson proves Clare hurling certainly not in the place we need to be
Limerick’s Graeme Mulcahy shoots on goal. Pictures: INPHO/Ryan Byrne
On my way down to Thurles yesterday, I stopped off in Nenagh. It wasn’t your usual championship pit-stop, I just pulled into a layby. The exercise was as much to take the temperature and mood of a new winter championship than to somehow try and compare it to the boiling and eternal summer Sundays that we always associated with championship.
I was just so thrilled to be on the road to Thurles but stopping off was also to kind of remind myself of the new normal. The road would usually be thronged but I nearly had the motorway to myself. Borris-Ileigh was like a ghost-town. I was able to park behind Semple Stadium’s new Stand, right up close to the Dome.
The silence and vacant spaces triggered so many different emotions. That was evident before I even left Clare. I took the scenic route and drove through Clarecastle for nostalgic sentiment. The place would normally be decked out in saffron and blue before a championship game but I didn’t spot a single flag.
In Thurles, I actually took a picture of the greyhound track where a lot of the Clarecastle lads traditionally meet before a championship game, having a pint there before heading into the ground. The memory almost made me feel lonesome.
The whole experience was just surreal. Dónal Óg Cusack and I were so caught up in our work with RTÉ beforehand that the magnitude of the experience only really hit us when we came off the air as the match was about to begin. After Joanne Cantwell handed over to Marty Morrissey and Donal O’Grady for the live commentary, and we turned around to see the players on the pitch against the backdrop of emptiness, the reality hit me in the face like a artic breeze.
It was almost like an out-of-body experience. Apart from the voices on the field, the atmosphere was so muted that it almost felt like you were watching it all happen while suspended under water.
I felt privileged to be there. I was so thankful to have the opportunity to be in Thurles when so many thousands of Clare and Limerick supporters couldn’t be. Yet, everything about the day still felt so unnatural to what championship days should really be all about.
Meeting and interacting with people is such a natural and warm part of that experience but all of that has been completely sterilised, and – correctly – distilled into a safety first approach at all costs. When you see a floor manager approaching, you’re nearly taking a step back. It was hard to recognise some of the RTÉ crew with the face-masks. When we had our pre-match meeting with social distancing protocols in place in the Old Stand, Rory O’Neill, The Sunday Game Producer, could have done with a loudspeaker to get his message across.
We were all working off a totally different script than usual but, unfortunately, the match followed the anticipated script written in advance; Clare did put it up to Limerick but the match faded out when Limerick dropped the pedal and sped away.
Clare couldn’t afford to be without the players they were but the real disparity between the teams was evident in their respective benches. On the otherhand, there are very few teams that could keep Darragh O’Donovan, Seamie Flanagan, Pat Ryan and David Reidy in reserve.
Being in his fourth year in the job too, John Kiely knows his players inside out at this stage. Clare were going well earlier in the year but, in such a crazy season, Brian Lohan is still getting to know his players in his first year in the job.
Brian was one of our greatest ever players in Clare but there’s much more to this than just the comparative squads. I don’t want to be here talking about my time in the Limerick Academy but I saw up close how Limerick did their business when I was there, and how that work is now paying off.
When Limerick were doing the warm-up yesterday, we were near enough to see the physique and power of their big men, guys like Kyle Hayes, Gearoid Hegarty and Tom Morrissey. When those fellas were 15, they were doing light Strength and Conditioning work. That may have been as much to focus on technique than developing strength and power but you can see the physical specimens they have grown into all these years later.
During my time with the Limerick minors, Cairbre Ó Caillearain was doing our S&C. Then Mikey Kiely was involved. Cairbre subsequently went to Arsenal before joining the Tipperary hurlers last year. When Joe O’Connor moved on last year, John Kiely replaced him with Mikey.
There is that continuity there now with Mikey but you reap what you sow. And we just haven’t sown enough in Clare; we haven’t won an U-21 or U-20 game since 2015; I was proud of the U-20s recent performance against Tipperary but we’ve still shipped some massive hidings in the last five years. In that context, it’s not as easy to roll these guys off the production line as it is in Limerick.
I’m not saying we need an Academy in Clare (well I’d love if we could have one) but we need to do more than what we are doing if we are to try and live with the stronger counties moving forward. Because we’re certainly not in the place we need to be.
I don’t want to be hammering lads but if you took Tony Kelly out of the team yesterday, Clare would have been whipped. Tony gave a display for the ages but that still wasn’t enough to prevent a ten-point defeat.
There were positives to the performance, especially in the first half. Limerick struggled to deal with Kelly starting at corner-forward. Clare’s workrate and application was impressive. But when Limerick ramped up the intensity immediately after the half-time break, Clare couldn’t live with their pace and power. Clare did really well to reduce the deficit to one point after Ryan Taylor’s goal but Limerick just pressed on the accelerator again and Clare had nothing in the tank in response.
Dublin did everything they had to on Saturday evening but they’ll know too that Kilkenny will present a whole different threat in six days. The Burkes – Donal and Conor – were a huge plus for Dublin. Both were in Boston last year when Dublin were beaten by Laois.
Conversely, too many of the Laois players on the field that afternoon weren’t there Saturday evening; Laois only had eight of that team but they weren’t replacing them with lads who had bumped the missing lads off on form. I heard Eddie Brenan interviewed earlier in the league and he was lamenting the sad fact that not enough Laois players were willing to surf those high waves and good vibes generated in 2019. It’s just a shame because that’s the time for lads to really jump on board.
When Clare started winning games under Len Gaynor in the early 1990s, players who had been lukewarm about committing to the cause were diving head-first into the deep end once the tide turned. Players are different now. Society is different too. But unless everything is done right now, you’ll be eaten alive by the teams that are taking it to the next level.
