McNamara reveals ‘second thoughts’ after Banner exit

FORMER Clare manager Mike McNamara admits he has had second thoughts about his decision to step down from the post.

McNamara and his management team of Alan Cunningham and Ollie Baker walked away from the helm last December following a nasty dispute with the county’s senior squad.

Clare under Banner legend Ger Sparrow O’Loughlin are currently top of the Division Two table heading into the final round of games but have laboured to victory in several of their games in the second tier.

Now the former boss has broken his silence and claims that if he and his management team had opted to stay in place, they would have received the backing of the county board.

“Results at the moment would show that decision may not have been right. Maybe the right decision for Clare would have been to stay. I don’t know.

“As a private person the right decision for me was to move on. In our case there certainly was a wrong done,” he told ‘BannerRoar’ an internet podcast dedicated to Clare sports.

“We would have moved on if the players came to us and said ‘we need a change of direction’.

“We’d have moved on without any hype or hassle. They didn’t do that. They decided to run to the media.”

McNamara claimed that the management were unable to communicate with the players which led to the decision to vacate their positions.

“(The players) didn’t want to listen. They were led from the outside by other individuals and listening wasn’t part of it. We didn’t try to shove anything down their neck either. We looked around and we had a chat amongst ourselves, Ollie (Baker) and Alan (Cunningham) and myself.

“We tried to decide what was right for Clare hurling and there was nothing else in our minds. Pressure from the county board and delegates was on to stay there. You must remember we took over in a cloud. We took over in what was the ‘Davy Fitz incident and the somebody else incident’ and the ‘Gerry Quinn incident’ and we took over in a cloud of controversy.

“We tried to calm the waters and did it very successfully for a year and half or thereabouts.”