Gerry O’Connor: How the Banner must improve

Gerry O’Connor says Clare must make scoring chances count in Championship 2018.

Clare hurling’s Gerry O’Connor says the Banner must convert more of their chances if they’re to succeed in 2018.

That was a big lesson for joint managers O’Connor and Donal Moloney from 2017: “We’ve obviously reviewed how things went over the last 12 months, but to be honest our focus recently was on the Super 11s as a starting point for the 2018 season.

“The learning from last year was that we created a lot of scoring opportunities — we probably created as many scoring opportunities as our opponents, but our conversion rate was way off the standard required.

"That was the main lesson that came out of our reviews.”

Clare have lost several experienced campaigners, like Brendan Bugler, Pat Donnellan and Darach Honan.

“Every panel evolves,” O’Connor says. “It would have been great if some of the lads could have held on, but the world moves on and life evolves. It gives us an opportunity to look at a few minors and U21s who’ve been floating around — they’ve held their hands up. Life moves on.

“Every panel shows changes in that space of time (since 2013), and we’re in the business of looking at what’s in front of us, and we’ve a working panel with the bones of 40 guys there. We’ll review that in the course of the year.

“We generally break the year into phases — phase one is the Munster League, phase two is the National League and phase three is the championship.

“And the championship will be very interesting from our perspective. I know the players will be looking forward to having two home games and two away games, but it’s a very intense period of time, four matches in five weeks.”

Tipperary manager Michael Ryan has emphasised that the new format will test panels to the “absolute limit”, but O’Connor points out that every county is in the same boat.

“It’s new to everybody and you’re going to have a situation where you’ll need a very strong panel.

Generally in the championship the team doesn’t evolve much once you get going. If you look at any championship-winning team — even the Mayo footballers, and the run they had this year with eight or nine games on the bounce, the team didn’t change that much over those games.

“But if you’re playing four games in five weeks you’re going to have injuries, so the strength in depth is going to be tested.”

Clare have also lost Dónal Óg Cusack as a coach and replaced him with Gavin Keary.

“First, from our perspective — mine and from Donal’s (Moloney) and the rest of the team — we learned a huge amount from Dónal Óg Cusack.

“He gave Clare huge service for the last two years. He’s now decided to move on because of the circumstances and we have a new guy in now, Gavin Keary, a really deep-thinking, intelligent, humble coach.

“He’s slotted right into the way we go about things really quickly.”

O’Connor’s review of the last campaign also took in the lessons delivered by eventual champions Galway, who he was so impressed with.

“At the moment, we are behind Galway, no doubt about that. They’ve been building this team for the last few years and fair play to them, they were mentally and physically challenged throughout the season and they delivered on all fronts.

“We’d like to think with hard work and plenty of mental and physical preparation that we can get to the level they reached this year,” said O’Connor.

“From our perspective, the big thing about Galway is that they’ll win the ball any way — in the air, down low. They probably have a group of 25- to 29-year-olds, whereas the oldest guy on our panel is 28.

“They’re two or three years down the road in terms of that cycle, so our job is to short-

circuit that cycle.”