Daly always ready to learn from a Catfight
Or mention the final score, 2-12 to 0-9 in Kilkenny’s favour. Or add that Clare’s top scorer was Seanie McMahon with four points from placed balls. Or refer to Ger Loughnane’s famous post-match speech in the Semple Stadium dressing room in which he asserted that Clare would win Munster because there was no team of the new league champions’ calibre in the province.
No, ask Daly about his first big encounter with Kilkenny and the chances are he’ll tell you about the outfits Clare wore.
It was a Loughnane wheeze, copied from Babs Keating’s first coming with Tipperary. Grey trousers, navy blazers, white shirts, Clare ties. Make them feel smart and important and good about themselves. I dress, therefore I am. Would that Descartes had been around to see it.
The problem was that the Clare players looked rather better than they hurled and after listening to Loughnane’s attempt to rally them in the dressing room, and privately wondering if the man had lost it altogether, the Clarecastle contingent — Daly, who’d been awful, Ger O’Loughlin, who’d been worse, Stephen Sheedy, Alan Neville and Fergie Tuohy — put on their new threads and ambled down to Hayes’s Hotel for post-match vittles.
There they were directed to an upstairs dining room to find they were the first arrivals and to be informed, not overly politely, by the waitress that they wouldn’t be served without tickets.
But Pat Fitzgerald, the county secretary and the man with the tickets, hadn’t arrived yet. The woman was not for budging. “Look,” Daly exploded, “Do you think the five of us have gone to the trouble of dressing up like this for your chicken and chips?”
Cue the departure of the quintet in that lofty vehicle, high dudgeon. They stopped off for toasted sandwiches in Finnegan’s of Annacotty on the way home.
For the Munster final, Clare went to the Anner Hotel.
Daly’s foul humour was easily explained, for not only had Clare been well off the pace but he’d had a trying afternoon marking Adrian Ronan, despite the fact that the latter was wearing a long bandage to protect a damaged hamstring. “Where d’ya think you’re going with that pair of tights on you?” Daly sneered during the national anthem. Ronan never being behind the door when it came to verbal jousting, the response was instant. “Take a look around you,” the Kilkenny forward snapped. “This is Thurles. The home of Munster hurling. That’s all you’ll ever know.”
Four months after the winning captain Bill Hennessy drove off with the league trophy slung in the boot of his car almost as an afterthought, further evidence to the watching Clare folk that these guys were breathing a different kind of air to them, Daly lifted the MacCarthy Cup.
The next All-Ireland champions had been on view in Thurles the day of the league final alright. We just didn’t realise they were the ones wearing saffron and blue rather than black and amber.
It was the afternoon a new planet hoved into view for Daly. Up to then, the category of “opponents” had been filled for him by Limerick, because they were the local rivals, and Waterford, because his early days with Clare seemed to consist entirely of championship meetings with them.
Tipperary, of course, would eventually become the Banner’s number one rivals in Munster. But ever after the 1995 league final, Kilkenny no longer inhabited a galaxy far, far away.
He went on to face them in two All-Ireland semi-finals, winning the first and losing the second, and as a manager he has come to measure out his life in encounters with the Black and Amber.
His first year as Clare boss brought two All-Ireland quarter-finals with them, his second year a league decider, his third an All-Ireland semi-final. The first of those clashes, the 2004 All-Ireland quarter-final in Croke Park, saw Daly give notice of the kind of manager he would become.
Kilkenny had beaten Galway by 19 points in their previous outing in the qualifiers. In the face of such firepower Daly, demonstrating that among the first essentials of management is the ability to cut the cloth at one’s disposal in order to fit, deployed Alan Markham as a seventh defender picking up the pieces behind the half-back line, having rehearsed the gambit exhaustively behind closed doors in Cusack Park for 10 days beforehand. It was a bravura piece of lateral thinking and it helped Clare to an unlikely draw.
That Brian Cody has always had heavier ordnance at his disposal has never daunted Daly. On the contrary, it has energised him. Cody’s Kilkenny. Their professionalism, their resolve, their flintiness, their skill, their everything: what manager wouldn’t want to pit his wits against that? Going head to head with Cody, analysing the questions Kilkenny ask of opponents and formulating ways of answering them, has made Daly a better manager. It would be amazing if it hadn’t. Of late he’s had all the answers. Dublin have met Kilkenny three times this year and have yet to lose. With an understrength team and only two subs they beat them in the Walsh Cup final, and in the league final they didn’t just beat them but murdered them. That’s progress.
Another way of recognising Dublin’s evolution is to compare and contrast with the provincial decider two years ago. Facing more or less the same Kilkenny team that had atomised Waterford the previous September, Dublin opted for safety first, fielded five forwards and made damn sure they wouldn’t go the way of Waterford.
In the event they performed respectably and held the champions to six points (or two goals, to be precise — it is not the same thing).
That was then. What’s different now is that Dublin are bigger, stronger, tougher, better. Instead of going out not to lose matches, they’re going out to win them.
Instead of trying to cope with Kilkenny imposing their game on them, they’re now imposing their game on Kilkenny, as they did so comprehensively in the league final. That’s further progress.
Would that Ryan O’Dwyer, one of their main bringers of war, were available tomorrow. His absence combined with Dublin’s losses in defence tilts the balance in favour of the holders, despite the travails of the latter’s full-back line in Wexford Park three weeks ago. But one thing we can take as read. Dublin will perform. And if a place in an All-Ireland quarter-final is to be their lot, be certain that Daly will ensure they perform there too.
He’s come a long way since the day of the navy blazers in Thurles.
- FOR the first time in history Dublin have reached the Leinster senior, U21 and minor hurling finals in the same year. In a 10-day period starting tomorrow, the Dubs will be chasing three provincial hurling crowns.
- LUCAN Sarsfields’ Johnny McCaffrey will captain the seniors tomorrow while his younger brother, Matthew, who lined out at left half-back for the minors in last Saturday’s semi-final, is involved in the curtain-raiser against Kilkenny.
- OISIN GOUGH (Cuala) is set to feature at corner-back in Anthony Daly’s senior side while his younger brother, Conor, who played at midfield for Dublin U21’s in last week’s semi-final win over Offaly, will contest the final against Wexford on July 13.
-BILL O’CARROLL from Kilmacud Crokes is right corner-back on that U21 hurling side while his older brother Rory is full-back on the Dublin senior football side that face Wexford in the Leinster final on Sunday week. The eldest O’Carroll brother, Ross, would also be in the squad but for injuries.
