Club may face disciplinary action

A great day for Tubber hurling may yet turn sour if, as appears likely, they are called before the CCC in relation to incidents at the end of last Saturday’s game with Cratloe.

Clearly annoyed at having to play the game without Ronan Taaffe, the goalkeeper on the Clare minor team that played and won the All-Ireland semi-final on Sunday, they vented their feelings after the final whistle.
At least one county official was the target of a verbal attack, while the refusal of Tubber to allow Mike O’Gorman from Cratloe to visit their dressing room after the game drew a lot of attention.
“The way we have been treated for the last week, we had to give a performance today. It is absolutely outrageous what happened to us. We offered Cratloe every day of next week and up to Wednesday of the following week but they wouldn’t co-operate one way or another. We had to give this performance today,” said Tubber boss Pat O’Connor after the game.
“Ronan Taaffe got injured and we looked after him. We paid for the treatment to make sure he was right for this match and what happened? We weren’t allowed to play him. We are extremely hurt and disappointed with everyone involved that a fixture like this would be scheduled for the day before the All-Ireland minor semi-final. To do that to Ronan Taaffe and to the minor management, who were involved in trying to set up a meeting last Thursday between the chairmen of both clubs, is wrong,” continued O’Connor.
“The chairmen met and Cratloe would not agree and we are extremely disappointed with them. We have had wonderful champions in Clare but Cratloe were not very gracious. Maybe it took something like this to get that performance from us,” O’Connor said.
Cratloe mentor Mike Deegan, while disappointed with the result, had no difficulty admitting that “the better team won today”. He went on to explain the happenings in the lead up to the game.
“We were contacted by Pat Fitzgerald over two weeks ago about the fixture. We couldn’t move to the following weekend due to football. We offered to play on the Tuesday. After our game with Wolfe Tones on the Sunday, Pat Fitzgerald informed me that Tubber had a problem with the Tuesday. I agreed to check out the position.
“We could not change from the Tuesday because we had football coming up. The only other option was to stick with the original fixture, which meant for us that we would be going without two players on the Clare minor team and also without Pádraig Chaplin, whose suspension wasn’t due to end until the Saturday night. We had to make a decision, as we could not find any other date,” Deegan said.
Deegan said he heard no more until Pat O’Connor contacted him three days before the game. “I explained the situation. We had offered Tuesday. I also explained the situation to Donal Moloney of the minor management. I went with Pat O’Gorman to a meeting with Pat Taaffe of Tubber. They wanted the game off for a week but we couldn’t agree to that due to football. They generated a cause and that is fine but what happened after the match on Saturday was a disgrace. They were out of order in refusing entry to their dressing room to Mike O’Gorman, who was going there on our club’s behalf to congratulate them. It is something we do after every game,” he said, before confirming that nobody from Tubber had visited their dressing room.
At the request of the Clare minor management team, made to the July meeting of the county board in Carron, all senior and intermediate clubs were contacted with a view to re-arranging their games in this round to avoid a clash with the minor semi-final.
It is understood that Tubber’s objection to playing the game on Tuesday evening was because of a clash with a ‘grad ball’, which Ronan Taaffe was to attend. As Cratloe have a crucial senior football championship game this weekend, they weren’t in a position to play the game any later than Tuesday evening.
It was a very fired up Tubber that took to the pitch for this tie on Saturday. Those in the small attendance located near the centre of the stand were able to hear Tubber manager Pat O’Connor stress to his charges the importance of the game in his pre-match address to the players.
Throughout the game the mentors, O’Connor, Pat Taaffe and Pascal Lee, kept urging their players on and this clearly paid off.