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The Cavan native knows Cork are the hottest of favourites but that’s not affecting his focus.
“I think if you start worrying where you are as regards placings versus where Cork are...we know it’s a huge, huge challenge for us,” he said.
“We’re a Division 4 team playing a top, top Division 1 team. It’s a big, big ask. It’s about ourselves; it’s about going in and performing on the day. It’s a Munster final, they don’t come around too often for Clare. We’re there now and we want to go out and give it our best on the day.
“Whatever that brings on the scoreboard at the end of full-time, that’s what’ll decide how well we perform.”
McDermott has tried to keep the approach low key: “We’ve tried with our whole approach to the eighth of July, keeping them calm, keeping them composed, not talking too much about the occasion or what it is all about because my own view is that we’re in the last 12 of the All-Ireland, we have two chances now to get to the quarter-final of the All-Ireland.
“Our first chance is on the eighth of July and it’s a matter of approaching it that way.”
He doesn’t feel Clare have already overachieved in 2012.
“I don’t think so because our main goal at the start of the year was to get promotion out of Division 4. We came up short against Wicklow and there was heartache, there’s no doubt about that but it created a new vigour in the team to achieve.
“I think that was evident in our performance against Limerick and once we achieved that the dreams and the goals start raising and you have to go with raising the bar and we know Cork are huge, huge favourites going into this but if you start fearing the opposition and thinking too much about what the opposition have to offer there’s no point in showing up.
“It’s going to be all about what we can control in our group. These guys, from a physical point of view and as regards a game point of view are well prepared for a Munster final. We’re going to go in and we’re going to give it everything and we’ll see what happens.”
McDermott says the difference in performance between last year against Offaly in the qualifiers and against Limerick in this year’s Munster championship was “down to luck” as much as anything.
“I remember that evening up in Tullamore when we played Offaly. I think we were seven points up at the end of the first half, playing really good football. Let Offaly back into it with a couple of easy scores. You look at even Down last year, we showed great character and were very, very unlucky in the qualifiers against them.
“It’s been coming for Clare over the last couple of years. They’ve worked extremely hard to get to the position where they are and maybe the rub of the green was with us against Limerick. I think back to about five minutes to go and I was standing on the sideline and Limerick were in the ascendency. I think there was a ball intercepted by John Hayes and Gordon Kelly stopped a certain Limerick score and that was probably the winning of the game.
“We went straight up the field and scored from it. It’s those little small things when momentum goes with you sometimes can win you a game and it happened that day for us.”
McDermott wasn’t in Clare in 1992 for their historic Munster final win but he was in Cusack Park for the last-gasp win over Cork in the championship five years later.
“The funny thing about it I was actually working in Cork for an 18-month period during it when we beat them here. I would have been friendly with Niall Cahalane.
“He was a sub on the day and I always remember him saying that from the subs bench he was watching to see where he could be potentially getting into a position for the Munster final and then bang, in two minutes that whole dream had gone and the Munster final Clare and Kerry rather than Cork and Kerry.”
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