Why they appreciate the little things in Clare
Where once the prevailing wisdom in Clare was that you had to be 6ft 3ins to be a senior county player, now coaching in the Banner is geared towards the six speeds of hurling
Before they set about playing differently, first, they had to think differently.
In Clare there was a traditional way of playing and a traditional way of thinking. The game was direct, physical, no frills involved; their preferred type of player, especially up front, robust, tall, no smallies allowed.
The fine team of the 1970s was a team in that image, with their coach Justin McCarthy later lamenting if only they had a forward in the mould of a wristy, speedy Jamesie O’Connor the team itself would have broken the mould.
Even the ’90s team of Loughnane that made the breakthrough were faithful to that tradition, with O’Connor about their only finesse player in attack. He was so untypical of a Clare hurler, he represented the county at minor football before he would play minor hurling. It took a six-point exhibition in an All-Ireland Colleges semi-final for him to be called up to a county minor panel that had already made it to a Munster final without him. That kind of small, fast, skilful player wasn’t the kind Clare mentors were producing or looking out for.
That trend continued well into the Noughties, even under the enlightened management of Anthony Daly. As Daly would admit after his team forced the defending All-Ireland champions to a replay in a quarter-final, there was no point in his team trying to out-hurl Kilkenny or the Waterford team of that era; there was a “Clare spirit”, a Clare way and they were at nothing if they didn’t acknowledge that and their limitations.
Under Daly, Clare would manfully maintain their status as a top-five team, but by 2007 the county was in the doldrums. Compare and contrast the forward line that lost to Limerick by seven points in Croke Park that year to the one that beat Limerick by seven there this year. Jonathan Clancy was the only player under 6ft 2ins. Playing alongside him in the half-forward line were Declan O’Rourke and Diarmuid McMahon; inside them, Niall Gilligan, Barry Nugent and Bernard Gaffney. Fergal Lynch would come off the bench, the two Tonys — Carmody and Griffin — being on sabbatical that year. You couldn’t have blamed them if they had never returned. Clare were going nowhere, not just at senior. For the eighth consecutive year the county’s minors or U21s hadn’t beaten anyone other than Kerry in the Munster championship.
They had to change their ways. They had to change their thinking.
A few things started to happen around that time. Paudie Butler was appointed national hurling co-ordinator and soon after came down to Clare one evening to spread the hurling gospel. Peter Casey, the county’s current games development officer, was one of the attendees in Roslevan that night — and one of the converted.
“I’d put a lot of it [Clare’s current success] down to that night. I was just starting coaching in Lisdoonvarna and all the coaches in the county at the time were working of a similar template — we were looking for speed because Loughnane had always talked about speed of hurling, but we weren’t really getting speed because we had a different idea about what speed was.
That evening Paudie took a development squad that would have featured a 16-year-old Darach Honan and he ran a session for an hour with them which was at the highest pace I’d ever seen. I remember there were another 10 or 12 lads with me and we were just gobsmacked.
“I’ll never forget him saying that there were six speeds to play a sport like hurling — running speed, hand speed, eye speed, mind speed, swing/hurling speed and then reaction speed. In Clare the coaches might be looking out for one or two of those speeds but not all six. Paudie was very positive that evening, saying to us, ‘In Clare you’re doing nine things out of 10 right, lads, you’re just a little bit short of what’s happening in some other counties’, but really we were a good bit short.
“The prevailing wisdom within the county at the time was that you had to be 6’3 to be a senior county hurler if you were to compete with the likes of Kilkenny.”
Butler would come down to Clare another half-dozen times or so over the next two years and each time the size and knowledge of the congregation grew. He challenged them to examine the length of the hurleys their players were using, the way they even held the hurley.
“An awful lot of our hurlers weren’t able to shorten the grip and therefore were being hooked against better competition,” says Casey. “We had players striking off the back foot because it was a habit they could get away with in training and in games within the county. When Paudie helped us identify what we were doing, we realised there was a better way to achieve the six speeds of hurling.”
Another key development at that time was when Bord na nÓg chairman Sean O’Halloran roped Gerry O’Connor in as a selector for the Tony Forristal U14 tournament.
O’Connor is now well-known throughout the county, following all the Munster titles he and Donal Moloney have guided the county’s minors and U21s to in recent years, but O’Connor confesses to being “an accidental coach” and would deflect a lot of the credit to others, including one of his fellow selectors back when he was involved with the Forrestal team.
PJ Kelleher was from Bodyke but it was almost like he was a disciple from the Barcelona La Masia academy where they bucked the conventional wisdom that a good big ’un was better than a good small ’un.
“We held extensive trials for that team and PJ really challenged us to think outside the box,” says O’Connor. “PJ would have been small enough in stature himself and from observing previous school and county teams reckoned too many big guys were getting in ahead of small, pacier, skilful guys. Then two years later at U16 level Donal Moloney came along and he would have also examined closely the kind of player at our disposal.”
Traditionally someone would take an East Clare U16 selection and someone else the Mid Clare selection and they’d work as two independent republics, but this time both managements worked in unison. While O’Connor and Kelleher took the Mid Clare selection on match days and Moloney and Eamonn Fennessy oversaw East Clare when the two teams clashed in the semi-final of that Nenagh Co-Op U16 competition, the four of them were effectively the same management team.
“That allowed us to look at every possible player. Instead of having 25 or 30 players to work with, we could spread the net to up to 60 players. And over those three months it became very apparent that if we got some very small, quick, skilful guys like [current seniors and U21s] Seadna Morey and [Cathal] Tots [O’Connell] the ball they would destroy a larger guy.”
The learning curve would continue at minor, though it wasn’t always linear or pleasant. In 2009 Moloney and O’Connor got involved with the minors along with the legendary Brian Lohan and would be emphatically knocked out of the Munster championship in the semi-final round by Waterford. After that everything was challenged and everyone along with it, including Lohan.
“It was very clear that the way we were preparing teams in Clare wasn’t adequate,” says O’Connor. “We trained as well as we possibly could but we were still using traditional methods.” In the painful post-mortem that followed, Lohan left the management team while O’Connor and Moloney stayed on, convinced Clare needed a different style of hurler and hurling than the blood-and-thunder type.
Their first port of call was actually the Waterford team that had run them off the field.
“The one thing we noticed when we visited their dressing room afterwards was that all their lads looked like senior players,” says O’Connor. “It was obvious they were way ahead of us in strength and conditioning and more besides after we sat down later with their manager Jimmy Meaney.”
They spoke to boxing coaches. They met with Pat Flanagan, who had trained the Kerry footballers and later the Waterford hurlers. They also teamed up with the renowned football coach Donie Buckley, who resides in Clare. Turns out Mayo aren’t the only All-Ireland finalists this month that have benefited from his groundbreaking methods in tackling.
“From talking to Donie we realised there was as little definition or coaching of tackling in hurling as there was in football and there were real gains we could make there to tackle and smother opponents effectively.”
Those discussions with Buckley as well as respected hurling coach Alan Cunningham would point them in the direction of an unknown 20-something coach. Paul Kinnerk had studied PE under Dr Cian O’Neill at UL, played under Buckley with the Limerick footballers, and worked with Cunningham on the PE staff at St Caimin’s College, Shannon.
It would not be a stretch to say Kinnerk has revolutionised Clare hurling. How good is he? Since he teamed up with O’Connor and Moloney in 2010, he has guided a Clare team to a Munster championship title every year at either minor or U21. He coaches both the county seniors and U21s. Davy Fitzgerald, one of the best and most innovative coaches of the last decade, delegates — defers — to Kinnerk all coaching duties on the training ground. That’s how special Kinnerk is.
Tommy Guilfoyle is one of Clare’s great hurling men, one of their best forwards in the dozen years prior to the Loughnane era and a coach on the ground for over 20 years. Nothing prepared him for watching Kinnerk at work.
“There was no running around cones and fellas just striking the ball back and forth to one another.
“Everything was games-based and opposed and based on pace.”
Kinnerk is just one of a number of progressive coaches in that U21 set-up. Moloney identified that Clare had to look differently at the aerial game and so drew up a series of drills to make Clare more effective in that facet.
“It’s not all about catching the ball cleanly,” O’Connor points out. “Any hurley will reach higher than any hand, so you can work on bringing it down to the ground and letting a team-mate get in on the break. So for sure we had to develop an aerial game, but maybe just not as we’d known it in Clare.”
The county’s idea of success had to change too. In 2011 Clare won the All-Ireland intermediate title but with a good share of players who had played senior for Clare before and had no intention of playing senior for them again. Last year and this year O’Connor and Moloney managed the intermediate side as well as the U21s. Neither intermediate side won Munster, just as none of those U14, U15 and U16 development squads won their competition either, but did they really lose? In the intermediates’ first-round game last year David McInerney played his first game at full-back for Clare. Conor Ryan was tried out at centre-back. Thirteen of the 19 players used in the Munster final were U21, eight of them who wouldn’t even start for the U21 side that would win that year’s All-Ireland.
“We used that [intermediate] team to blood lads to perform at U21 level, with the next step being to get them into the senior set-up,” explains O’Connor. “You have to park your ego when you’re involved at underage level in Clare now. It’s all about development. And another big plus we have at that level is there’s a great camaraderie between the various counties at that level. We would regularly exchange ideas with the likes of [Kilkenny U21 manager] Richie Mulrooney. At club level that would be seen as a weakness but we believe it is a sign of strength. We’ve made it very clear when someone joins our set-up they have to be full of ideas. They nearly need to be better than us, a threat to us, something a lot of other managers don’t like. ”
O’Connor will be the first to acknowledge that the real heroes of this latest Clare revolution have been the men of the quiet fields, with the clubs and the schools. People like PJ Fitzpatrick, the school principal in Clonlara who produced five of the 2009 U21 All-Ireland-winning team. Michael Browne in Crusheen. Fergie O’Loughlin and Donal Kelly — Tony’s dad, in Ballyea. Terence Fahy in the school in Tulla. And then out in Cratloe, the first Clare club to showcase the running game for a smaller, faster player, there have been people like school principal Jody O’Connor, Conor McGrath’s dad, Joe, and Podge Collins’ dad, Colm. The latter is now been linked with the Clare senior football job. A few years ago when he was over the club senior hurlers, traditionalists frowned upon their football-style possession game, but Cratloe were winning games and they’re now winning the argument too.
“What you’ve had in Clare is a huge population shift and with it a shift in the mindset as well,” observes O’Connor. “Traditionally east Clare was the powerbase of Clare hurling. I’m from there myself, out in Kilnamona, and they can be very reluctant to change which comes from being a rural community. But if you travel a bit, it gets you thinking about what’s going on around you and you’ll express yourself differently. And over the last 15 years new populations popped up all over the county in non-traditional hurling areas. Coaches were given more of an opportunity to think differently and the great thing for them was they didn’t have to encounter any great resistance within those clubs. Somewhere along the line you had parents like Joe McGrath and Colm Collins and Donal Kelly who were not willing to be your traditional coach. ”
There would still be an element of the Clare hurling fraternity that resists this new Clare way. The seniors were largely outnumbered at most of their championship games outside Ennis this year. Even those who have attended the games have expressed their reservations. “You’ll still hear them in the stand,” Guilfoyle notices. “The team will be looking to play that 10-yard ball and supporters will shout ’Why don’t they hit the f*****g’ ball?’”
A couple of years ago Guilfoyle would have been one of them. Not now. This year the Feakle intermediate team he’s coaching are averaging 35 points a game. Their primary playmaker is 5ft 1in, a 20-year-old from one of the development squads O’Connor and Moloney tutored a few years ago.
“Before we were a hit and hope team in Feakle,” admits Guilfoyle. “I was old school. When I first watched Kinnerk coaching those underage teams, I thought it wasn’t going to work out, that there was no way it would do against the likes of Kilkenny. Then last year I was at that U21 challenge match in Templetuohy when Clare destroyed Kilkenny[7-22 to 1-16]. That’s what convinced me that this is the way to go.”
All over the county they’re continuing to open their minds. Last week Peter Casey got a call from the O’Callaghan Mills club, saying they had eight people eager to take a level one coaching course. “Five years ago if we were running that,” says Casey, “we’d have been fortunate to get eight people in the entire county.”
That’s the scary thing. The county jersey is now hugely fashionable within the county, all development squad sessions are fully attended, but they know there’s more to do. The other week the U14s reached the Tony Forrestal final but a couple of other underage teams didn’t do as well as expected. In the next fortnight, Casey and the coaches of those teams will sit down with Jamesie O’Connor, Sean McMahon, Brian Quinn and Jim McInerney and review how those development squads and their structures can be even better.
Once you see things differently, you never look back at them the same way again.
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