Collins: No Such Thing As A Certainty In Championship Football

When Colm Collins looks back on his time in charge of the Clare senior footballers, his showdowns with Kerry are sure to provide a large portion of both the championship highlight and lowlight reels.

2014 and 2017 saw Clare put their esteemed neighbours to the pin of their collars before seeing early dominance fade to defeat. By stark contrast, trips across the Shannon Estuary resulted in heavy and chastening losses in 2018 and 2016.

The latest chapter in the tale will be written in Cusack Park on Saturday evening with the home side coming into the contest with a full hand to pick from. A one point victory over Waterford came after a nervy closing few minutes, but also came without having the likes of David Tubridy, Cathal O’Connor, Sean O’Donoghue and Keelan Sexton from the start. Sexton has departed for foreign shores as he will spend the summer in the USA, but Tubridy, O’Connor and O’Donoghue are all in contention to start after jumping off the treatment table.

Collins feels there is an upbeat mood in the camp ahead of Saturday evening’s showdown.

“We have been very happy with everything since that Waterford game. The few injuries we had are clearing up and it is all good on that front so it has been a good three weeks since. It was hard to watch back that Waterford game because there were a lot of aspects of our play that we were disappointed with. Waterford came up that evening with a specific game-plan and they executed it well. That being said, if we had scored what we should have in the first-half we would have been comfortably ahead and it wouldn’t have come down to the finish the way it did. We started missing chances in the second-half and they took a bit of heart from that. Championship football is all about wins and losses so thankfully from our point of view it was a win on that day and it bought us a ticket to next Saturday which was the main objective” he noted.

Clare have had three weeks to formulate their plans for their latest bid to inflict a first ever championship defeat on the Kingdom in Ennis, and a first anywhere since that famous day in 1992. Collins admits that while his team face a huge challenge, it is one they know they can put up a huge performance for.

He said: “When you look at what has happened all over the country in the championship in the past few weeks, we were just glad to get the result against Waterford. We saw Limerick get the better of Tipperary, Mayo got turned over by Roscommon, and all those results just show that there is no such thing as a certainty in championship. We have always taken the view that you go out to try and win a game. We have never done anything else and that is the way we are approaching Saturday also. We are at home and we are going to give it our very best shot. You can never be sure what way a game is going to unfold. A lot of teams prepare in very different ways so you just wonder are they looking down the track and what way will they play. We wouldn’t be taking anything for granted in how they game will be played. You would like to think it will be an all out game of football but you just never know”.