Daly: We can run or stand up and be counted
None felt the shock more severely, more personally, than those in the eye of the storm, the players, the manager, the selectors.
“If you wrote away for a nightmare, you couldn’t have got worse,” said Fr Harry Bohan, one of those selectors.
“It’s beyond understanding. We never got started at all, in either half. We’ll just have to go away and think about it for a few days, but it’s a mystery. Everything went wrong, Waterford fellas were picking up broken ball everywhere, it went wrong right through the field. It hit us like a thunderbolt.”
Bohan, a selector on the Clare double League-winning teams of 1977/78, coached by current Waterford manager Justin McCarthy, was speaking on local radio station Clare FM.
On the same station, keeper Davy Fitzgerald added: “All I can do is apologise, we let down the people of Clare.
“I don’t know what happened, we’re absolutely devastated. We worked awfully hard and believe me, every one of the lads is gutted.
“We just never got out of the starting blocks. I knew they were going to come out with fire in their bellies after last week, we just weren’t ready for it. We have no excuse for the way we played, it was absolutely dreadful stuff. I just don’t know what else to say.”
Left to pick up the pieces is manager Anthony Daly.
“If there had been any indication in training that we were going bad, but there wasn’t. Everything was going so well, the League had been a reasonable run. This thing just came out of the blue. We had a challenge game among ourselves last
Sunday night in Ennis, and it was three times as good as what we’d seen in the League final in Limerick. I was on the whistle, no holding back, but the hurling was superb, top-class.
“And it wasn’t as if we weren’t tuned in either, we did a bit of sharpening up in Cashel on Sunday, the first touch was electric, and I said to Alan Cunningham on the bus to Thurles, ‘if we’re beaten today, I’ll throw my hat at it’.
“We were never as right. Everything seemed so good, then we go out in Thurles and play like U14s.
“After seeing Waterford lose the League final, I knew there’d be a sting in the tail, we were expecting a backlash. I just didn’t expect that we’d play so poorly. Everything we tried went wrong, Diarmuid (McMahon) and Colin Lynch going for the same ball, getting it wrong between them, Waterford getting a point from that; that short free from Gillie, in the second- half was a piece of genius. He put the ball into Fordie’s hand, but it just fell out. Fordie, would love to have buried it, but that’s what was happening to us. That would have brought it back to five, maybe put a bit of doubt in Waterford minds.”
Daly accepted: “You have to give credit to Waterford, they were outstanding. Ken McGrath, Browne, Kelly, Shanahan,
Mullane, they’ll be under pressure now because there’s no easy game in Munster. But if any bunch of players deserves to win an All-Ireland, it’s them.”
But what of Clare?
“We’ll rally from this. Thank God for the back door, at least we don’t have to walk away after such a beating. Last year, after the hiding from Cork, we got a bit of pride back the way the lads played against Galway in the Park, they went down fighting. We didn’t on Sunday.
“We were going to meet tomorrow but I’ll probably leave it to Friday, give fellas a chance to absorb this. Maybe the last thing we need is another meeting, we’ve enough talking done, ‘we’re right, we’re going to give it everything’, all that sort of stuff; time now to just get out and do it.”
They could meet Galway in the qualifiers, or the losers of Cork/Limerick or Wexford/Kilkenny. Bring it on, says Daly.
“I’m hoping it’s a tough one, sink or swim, find out if we still have it or not. Win a tough one, something to galvanise them, and give them the confidence again. It’s run away or stand up and be counted, and I’m not running away, I’ll give it everything now for the next five weeks, see where we are.”
According to Mike McCartney of Clare FM, the main complaint from callers had nothing to do with those on the field.
The major bitching was about the Clare supporters who left the ground long before the final whistle. Understandable, admits Daly.
“You get that in every county. There’s been a lot of hype since I was appointed, a lot of talk about ’95 and ’97 again and maybe they were the ones who came back because of that, the idea that something special was happening. The hardcore supporters stayed on, and that’s the difference between a fan and a real supporter. We’ll be down to the supporters again the next day, so I hope it’s a home draw.”
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