Mulqueen keeping fingers crossed on Banner’s double-jobbers

Fingers crossed on the double for Clare senior hurling selector Louis Mulqueen in advance of this evening’s Bord Gais Energy Munster U21 hurling final against Tipperary in Semple Stadium (7.30pm).

First, obviously, he’s hoping that the reigning Munster and All-Ireland champions win and maintain their recent outstanding record in this grade. Second, he’s hoping that those on the senior panel emerge unscathed for Clare’s All-Ireland semi-final clash on Sunday week against Limerick.

“Everything depends on the U21 final,” he said ahead of the Limerick match. “18 of our panel are involved in the U21 setup so you don’t know how they’re going to emerge from that. At the moment we have a lot of niggly little things but we’re hoping all of that will have cleared up come Sunday week.”

It’s nothing major, he says, “A few fellas carrying hamstring strains right throughout the season, guys like (full-forward) Darach Honan, Colin Ryan, Conor McGrath. A lot of our starting 15 have had problems throughout the year but we’re nursing them through. We’re heading into our sixth championship match of the season. That’s a good position to be in for Clare hurling.”

It’s not an ideal position to be in, he admits, the dual panel, but it could be worse. “It’s good in that it shows Clare are progressing, competing at all grades, but we’ll have only 15 at training this evening, the other 18 will be getting ready for Semple Stadium. It’s good also from the point of view that these players are getting experience of big-game situations, but if one of them gets a knock they mightn’t recover and that’s one of the drawbacks. Like, we’ll have had probably only two trainings with the full squad before we play Limerick. The only thing is, it didn’t do Dublin any harm to play all those matches — what else would young lads want to do only play games?.”