Banner stick to basics for final test

While Clare senior hurling manager Davy Fitzgerald has built his reputation on innovation, on tactical thinking, his counterparts on the U21 team that has qualified for Saturday’s Bord Gáis All-Ireland U21 hurling championship final (7pm, Semple Stadium) have a more straightforward approach.

It’s not that tactics don’t enter their thinking, says Gerry O’Connor (Donal Moloney is the other half of the duo), but you’ve also got to place your trust in the players themselves.

“The seniors play to a particular pattern and we play to our pattern. You’re going to have a general style of play but ultimately you’re going to play to the strengths of the players at your disposal. If you’ve got three huge guys who can win ball in the half-forward line then you’re going to use a puck-out strategy that will incorporate them. But if you’ve got more of a running team, you are going to develop a style around those guys.”

With this very talented group, it’s very much a case of the latter, a potentially prolific forward sextet, most of whom have senior experience.

The challenge is to harness all that talent: “You allow them to develop in training in situations where they make the right decisions on the field rather than having any great style of play.”

The time they spent training and playing with the senior side was time well spent, reckons O’Connor, but there was also a downside to that: “There was almost 10 U21s on the senior panel at one stage, if we included Daire Keane,” says O’Connor.

“There are positives and negatives — the positives are they’re getting big-game experience from playing in the Munster championship but the negative from our point of view is we’ve seen very little of them during the course of the year.

“They have to readjust to the way we like them to play, so it balances itself out. From a purely selfish point of view, we’d much rather have had access to those players all through the year!”

Speaking of Daire Keane, his industry and power will surely be missed this Saturday. “He’s a huge loss for us. He broke a bone in training with the seniors two-and-a-half months ago. He’s only back training two or three weeks so there’s no chance of him playing any part at all on Saturday night.”

It’s a repeat of the All-Ireland minor final of two years ago, won by Kilkenny by just two points. The two sets of management teams remain the same, Kilkenny’s Richie Mulrooney having also been promoted to U21 ranks.

But O’Connor isn’t looking to the past: “It’s all about the now with these guys.”