Gutsy Ryan steps up to plate

Clara’s match-winner Lester Ryan said he had no choice but to go for goal four minutes from the end of normal time.

Straight out of Anthony Nash’s book, the Kilkenny inter-county midfielder rolled the close-range free yards ahead of him before unleashing a shot that was deflected to the net and put his team into a lead they never relinquished.

“Keith’s [Hogan] the free-taker usually so I knew that if I stood up for the free I’d have to go for a goal. It was something we needed. We needed to get a goal in that match. We’d been hit with two bad blows in the first half.”

He joked his team-mate, former Kilkenny player Conor Phelan, had told him to go for goal. “But it was easier said than done,” he smiled.

Ryan added a point for good measure in the penultimate minute to give Clara a little bit more breathing space.

“It took ages to fall. I turned around and I knew it was straight over the bar. I didn’t think it would take so long to go over the bar. The roar came about five seconds after when I was running down the field. It was just a brilliant win.

“You don’t think about the pressure during the game. When he added on a minute it seemed like an awful long time.”

It was a disappointing spectacle but Ryan couldn’t care less. “I won’t look back on the quality of this match because it doesn’t matter. The result is the only thing that matters.”

Having seen their lead disappear at half-time due to an injury-time Brian Donovan goal, Clara faced the second half against a strong wind. but Ryan wasn’t worried.

“We said to ourselves if it was a draw at half-time we would have taken that before the match. You just have to live with these things and go on and play the second half.

“Maybe being two points up, we might have been a bit more complacent but with the teams level we tore straight into it.”