Clare to prove tender years no impediment
A few months back, the great Brian Lohan said this Clare team was capable of winning an All-Ireland and was castigated a bit at the time, people saying he was putting too much pressure on such a young group of players. Brian knew what he was talking about though. He was involved with a lot of these players at underage and saw the talent.
Brian himself was part of a very young team that made the breakthrough for Clare in 1995. Typical of Lohan at that time, he didn’t worry about his age or lack of experience and he’s not worried about it now either. Clare had three or four U21s that year, Seánie McMahon was only 22, the Lohans around the same age, Anthony Daly a very young captain. The man who got the winning goal in ’95, Eamonn Taaffe, he was a teenager, only 19. None of that mattered and it didn’t either in 1999 when an even younger Cork team, with an average age of 22, ended the run in Munster of that Clare team. It didn’t matter either in 2010 when a Tipperary team with five U21s ended the run of probably the greatest team of all time, Kilkenny. And those five Tipp youngsters were probably the main men in that win.
