Hurling: The gift that keeps on giving promises more in 2014
This Thursday evening the team that won the All-Ireland last Saturday will find out who they’re facing in next year’s Munster championship. Everyone will know who they’re playing. It will give them all a focus, a clearer idea of the path and vision for the year ahead, and away they’ll go to dream and plan accordingly.
The Munster hurling draw in particular will be fascinating. All of them can beat each other. None of them will fear Clare. All of them have beaten Clare at some stage in the championship over the last two and a half years.
But as we know it won’t be the end of Clare’s year or world if they happen to lose in Munster next summer. It wasn’t when Cork beat them in the first round this year. Consider this: Patrick Donnellan and Brendan Bugler were the only starters for Clare last Saturday who have won more than one Munster senior championship match.
Neither of them has won a Munster medal, at any grade.
Contrast that to the last team Davy Fitzgerald led to an All-Ireland final. Most of that Waterford side won three or four Munster titles. Some of them like John Mullane and Eoin Kelly played in eight Munster finals. Not one of them won an All-Ireland. So there’s John Conlon with one Munster championship win and one All-Ireland medal to his name and John Mullane with his 13 Munster championship wins and no All-Ireland.
Them’s the breaks, and no doubt Clare got some breaks this year. The most obvious is Brian Gavin’s decision to allow Patrick Kelly puck it out one more time. But perhaps the biggest was the first round qualifier draw in late June. Davy has spoken about how he regrouped the troops after their defeat to Cork in the Gaelic Grounds, but as useful as the MiWadi and biscuits were that Monday, the way the balls hopped for them in the bowl earlier that morning was just as crucial. Would such a young team after such a letdown been able to survive a showdown with a Kilkenny or Tipp — especially in Nowlan Park or Semple Stadium? Highly unlikely. Laois at home as much as that gathering in Davy’s home was precisely the kind of therapy they required at that time.
Every other break they earned. Their success — and Cork’s — this summer underlines nothing improves a team quite like games but that doesn’t do justice to the remarkable coaching job Fitzgerald has pulled off here.
Last Sunday he spoke about the irate female supporter who threw a programme at selector Louis Mulqueen after that defeat to Cork in Limerick, telling him where he could stick it and his short game.
It brought to mind the line the biographer David Hill once wrote about the musician Prince. Back when he was still primarily a black underground artist, he was the warm-up act for the Rolling Stones for a couple of concerts in LA, only to be booed off stage and have rotten food thrown at him.
Punters had come to rock and didn’t care for the little black guy with the high-pitched voice. The experience scarred Prince but as Hill would observe, he would have his revenge when a few years later some of the rednecks who had pelted chicken skin and cabbage at him would have bought Purple Rain, relenting as all of America did to his purple groove.
That same woman who threw that programme at Mulqueen was probably at the homecoming last Sunday night. And we particularly love the idea that the same fellas who used to bully Fitzgerald when he was a kid, who’d throw his shoes, shirt and jumper out the school bus window and give him a kicking in a deserted classroom, were there somewhere in Sixmilebridge or Clarecastle or Ennis last Sunday night with their own children, chanting Fitzgerald’s name.
Clare and Fitzgerald face challenges. Breakthrough management teams tend to struggle with what the old NBA coach Pat Riley perceptively identified as the Disease of Me; when some people are perceived to get too much credit and others don’t feel like they get enough. You had it with Coleman and Moran with Derry in ’93. Mike Mac felt he deserved more acclaim with Clare after ’97.
In Armagh there was a perception Big Joe got a little too much of the plaudits and Paul Grimley didn’t get enough, Paddy Tally would part ways with Mickey Harte, while only this past month the departure of the under appreciated Rory Gallagher from the Donegal set-up shows Ulster teams in particular are prone to the affliction Riley spoke about.
Davy to his credit has feted others with this seismic win for Clare, and it is important in the coming months and years that he manages his own ego as well as everyone else’s. But already he’ll have ideas about how to keep everyone suitably grounded, namely the draw we’ll all be watching on Thursday night.
