No time for sentiment for Banner legends

FOR decades they soldiered side by side in the black-and-white of Clarecastle, for years in the saffron and blue of Clare; Ger O’Loughlin and Anthony Daly, Sparrow and Daler.

Three county senior titles and one Munster club in the 90s with the Magpies, two Munster and All-Ireland titles with Clare in the same glorious period, they have a kinship that has been forged in the shared torture of many a lung-bursting training session, then burnished in the hell-fire heat of championship hurling.

This afternoon in Croke Park they will be in opposite corners as Clare take on Dublin in the 2010 All-Ireland senior hurling championship, O’Loughlin as manager of his native county, Daly in charge of Dublin, but there’ll be no resentment?

“Sure we’re the best of mates,” says O’Loughlin. “It’s just one of those things, you get on with it. We’ll be chatting after the game but up ‘til then it’s mind-games, all that sort of thing.

“We were never on opposite sides before, we trained the club minors together going back 15 years, but once the ball is thrown in, that’s it for us, it’s all down to the lads, the best team on the day wins.

“All you can do is try to outfox the opposition beforehand, have the lads prepared well enough to enable them get over the line.

“I know for a fact Dublin will be giving everything for Anthony, and for themselves – I’m hoping our own lads will do the same for us, and for themselves.”

Similar sentiments from Daly. “There was probably a bit of slagging there alright before the Waterford game with Davy in charge (Fitz, Waterford manager, another Clare great), a lot of rivalry there because of the Munster championship, but there’s no real rivalry there anyway with Dublin.

“Go back far enough and there’s a huge tradition of Claremen winning All-Irelands with Dublin, the likes of Tommy Daly, Fowler McInerney, Bill Loughnane, so there was a kind of affinity there really.

“They only ever met in the All-Ireland qualifiers really, and Clare would have hammered Dublin every time (three meetings, 2002, 2005 and 2006, Clare winning by 20 points, 17 and 14, respectively) – there’s probably nothing there in Clare only sympathy for Dublin, really!”

There’ll be no such sympathy this afternoon of course – “No, and you wouldn’t expect it,” says Daly – but there will be a game, and nothing like 14 points between them at the end either, regardless of the winner.

It’s a meeting of equals, a good Leinster/Munster crossover, reckons Daly: “I think it will be an open game; Clare will come up and play with the freedom they played with against Waterford, no inhibitions, and we’ll be the same, come out and have a cut at it.

“There will be no negativity from our point of view, we’re going gung-ho for this, I said that at our last team get-together.”

One worry, however, for O’Loughlin – the referee. “A few tight decisions went against us in the Waterford game, decisions I would have question marks over,’’ he recalled.

“I hope that we won’t be talking about the referee again after this game. We’ve seen it too many times this year already, in hurling and football – in a tight game the referee can have a huge influence, and I think we could do with an improvement in that area.

“It’s soul-destroying for teams, all that effort gone to waste because of wrong decisions.

“The best referee, and it’s been said many times, is the one that you don’t notice, but there’s too much controversy at the moment.”