25 hallmarks of the real Clare hurling fan ...

The original Banner Banger will be tuned up and ready for road again come final day, with the bottom of the Hill in Shannon chosen as the symbolic starting point of the journey.

1) You know the words by heart and get emotional hearing them. Move over Joe Connolly, Páidí Ó Sé and Dara Ó Cinnéide, but this was the greatest speech of them all: “There’s being a missing person in Clare for 81 long years, well today that person has been found alive and well and that person’s name is Liam MacCarthy. We have listened to many, many jibes down the years, we were told to stick to our traditional music, well in Clare we love our traditional music but we love our hurling too.”

2) Dalo’s other great oration is memory-banked too, the valedictory stand by de Banks after the ’97 Munster final when he told Tipperary and blue bloods everywhere that “our mission was to show that we’re no longer the whipping boys of Munster”.