Dalo still drawn by the pull of management

It’s only been a week since he officially stepped down from his director of hurling post with Limerick’s underage academy, but Anthony Daly is never short of suitors and he’s already lending his weight to another cause.

No, not the Dubs.

Clarecastle will be involved in the Clare senior relegation final this coming Sunday and both ‘Dalo’ and Ger ‘Sparrow’ O’Loughlin have been drafted in, as the man himself said yesterday, to try and help ward off the dreaded drop.

Between that, his media duties with RTÉ for the All-Ireland final and his involvement with the launch of eir Sport’s new season — he will be a pundit for their hurling club championship coverage — he has hardly had time to catch his breath.

Ask him about the fact that he continues to be linked with a return to the still vacant post of Dublin manager and he can’t help but produce that trademark smile and protest that he hasn’t received so much as a phonecall from Parnell Park.

“Sure I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it. Honest to God. I haven’t, I swear to God. Until someone picks up that phone… You’d have to think about it then, maybe, but look I’d be driving myself demented looking at my mobile phone. ‘Did I miss any calls?’

“Look it, at this stage of my life as well, if you go back at that level, you’d have to give up the media stuff and it’s nice, like. You can still have a very high level of involvement in the thing.

“I’ve done nine years of it and feck it, I played as well and had a good innings.

“I managed. I’d like to have won an All-Ireland. That’s something I’d have to say that I would regret. It didn’t happen and sure, look, I still enjoyed it all. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s a long haul as well, all that.”

Nothing definitive there, then.

Clare’s loss in the ‘05 semi-final and Dublin’s eight years later, both of them to Cork, rankle most and the pull which management still exerts over him was apparent as he spoke about the box of DVDs that he still dips into every now and then.

He raked back yesterday over lost puck-outs, yellow cards and the gutsy call by Cork in the first of those defeats to call Brian Corcoran and Ronan Curran ashore. It’s torture to watch. He admits it and yet he still delves in.

The Limerick gig he was ready to leave last year but Joe McKenna was a hard man to say no to. Daly isn’t sorry he stayed as long. After years managing the bigger picture with Dublin and leaving the sessions to Tommy Dunne, this was a chance to reboot his coaching skillset.

That refresher course has already helped him hit the ground running with Clarecastle and it would be somebody with just that type of expertise that Pat Gilroy would need alongside him were he to take over the capital hurlers.

Suggestions that the former football All-Ireland winning manager could be in the running for the job came from left-field but Daly had enough dealings with him when they were both managing Dublin teams to know the man is a capable operator.

Whether he could make a success of the hurling job, Daly wouldn’t “have a clue”.

He thought Ger Cunningham was the perfect man to succeed him at the time and yet the Corkman’s three-year term delivered poor results amid a huge turnover of players.

The hope is that some of those disenchanted by the last regime — some walked, others were pushed — will return although Daly warned it would be almost impossible for players to return to the inter-county scene after lengthy absences.

The flip side is the younger generation is already in situ.

“In some ways, for whoever is next there, Ger has done an awful lot of spadework in terms of blooding lads. You could argue some of them were blooded a bit before their time but they are still blooded now. They have a taste of it.”