Vaughan: Top tier return vital

CLARE captain Pat Vaughan believes Division Two hurling is continuing to stunt the development of Ger O’Loughlin’s team.

The Banner face Limerick tomorrow evening (Ennis, 6.30pm) in the Allianz League final with the winner securing promotion to the top flight.

But Vaughan believes that the lopsided standard in the second tier is detrimental to many teams plying their trade in the division and is desperate for Clare to emerge from the section.

“It’s a massive match for both teams, but for Clare especially.

“Being in Division Two last year and this year, it was hard to improve your hurling.

“You’re playing some teams that you’re beating by over 20 points and there’s nothing for us to learn from that.

“The majority of this team was on the U21 side two years ago which won the All-Ireland. And it does nothing for their confidence to be playing that standard of hurling. It would be a huge plus to win and get up to Division One.”

Unfortunately for Clare (and for Limerick) the current eight team structure of the top flight dictates that there will always be two strong hurling counties in Division Two battling for one promotion place.

“At the start of the year Limerick and ourselves were favourites to get to the final, and that’s how it turned out.

“We started badly and were well beaten by Limerick in our first game. It is hard to put a finger on why we were so poor. The weather was bad but that didn’t affect Limerick, they played well, blew us off the field.

“We were very inconsistent throughout the league, losing to Laois and only barely got past Antrim in Antrim. Limerick have been very consistent. They won all their games, and they’ll be hoping to make it one more win now.”

No-one knows better than Clare, however, that topping the division doesn’t mean a thing.

Unbeaten through the regular rounds, they managed that feat last year, but then lost to Wexford in the decider.

“Getting to the final is the first challenge, and then you have to win it. Nothing else matters. The first game was only the first game of the league, bad weather, and someone said there was six or seven thousand at it — you’d expect up on 15,000 for this, and a lot of those from Limerick. We’re much further into the season now, we’d be hoping that if our heads are right, and if we bring our A game, we can come out on top this time.”