Colm Collins has Clare players daring to dream

Last Saturday evening when Gary Brennan stood on the steps of the Hogan Stand, it served as a reminder of another fact of the county he represents so well.

Twenty-one years earlier from the same spot, Anthony Daly gave one of the most celebrated speeches in GAA history, encapsulating the passion and craving of a people. It wasn’t a line Daly could quite have worked into his speech that day, nor would it have been appropriate for Brennan to reference in any way Daly’s address, given this was still ultimately only a Division Three league final. But the genuine delight and pride that was palpable in Croke Park on Saturday underlined that in Clare they not only love their hurling and their traditional music, but in large pockets of it, they love their football as well.

This quiet, incremental, but undoubted progress they’ve been making can be attributed to the appointment of a man who embodies that love of a game and a county. Colm Collins has been one of the lowest profile managers Clare have had this past 25 years. After the messianic effect that John Maughan had, the county continuously turned to big-name, Celtic-Cross-jangling appointees to work a similar kind of miracle, not least because the Mayo man’s immediate successor, John O’Keeffe, did such a manful job of retaining the county’s standing as a top-12 team. But it didn’t work for or with John Kennedy, and more spectacularly, Páidí and even Micko.