In Discussion

Who’d have thought you’d hear former British prime minister, Maggie Thatcher and Davy Fitzgerald mentioned in the same breath? Well, that’s what happened when five hurling experts got talking in Cairde, Barrack Street, Ennis. Peter O’Connell let the conversation flow as smoothly as the tea and coffee

Compare how this panel has prepared to your own day?
Jackie O’Gorman: I remember we had a Saturday morning session once in Ennis [1970s]. It was on at about 12. [Mick] Moroney came late, of course. We were going round the field and I said ‘Moroney, you’re dodging it today’. ‘Christ, I’m not,’ he said. ‘There’s rain promised this evening and I had to put 2,000 bales in before I came down’. That couldn’t happen now. The farmer, the blocklayer, the plasterer. It just couldn’t be done.
Seánie McMahon: It was only when I gave up hurling [2006] that I realised how much time was going into it. And I’d say it’ll be the same with these lads. When they stop hurling, they’ll say ‘how did we do it? How did we give seven nights a week to it?’ But then, no more than you Jackie or Cyril, would you swap it? You absolutely wouldn’t.
Harry Bohan: When I took over the Clare team [early 1970s], you had Newmarket togging in one corner and the Clarecastle lads in another. When we got into Munster finals and league finals and trained in Tulla, what we got to eat were sausages and rashers. The board would have been very reluctant to support the county team, even accommodating them with pitches and balls and so on. It was light years from where they are now.
SM: There was definitely a huge change from when I started in ’94, ’95 to when I finished in ’05, ’06. Even things like eating. The Sherwood Inn on the Friday night before the All-Ireland was Hawaiian burger and chips, Fanta and two ice creams going out the door. By the time I finished, there was none of that and there was probably a far greater element of science to everything that we were doing, training wise, eating wise, by the finish of it.
JOG: For us, training was always Tuesday and Thursday. If people were tramming hay, it might be Wednesday and Friday but that was the only reason it would be changed. When I started in the ’60s, John Hanley was looking after us and Colum [Flynn] was doing the training that time. Then after that, we went downhill a bit.

Discuss Clare’s current style of hurling.
Cyril Lyons: I was thinking about Davy during the year. Particularly say games like Laois and Wexford, where Clare’s style of play wasn’t particularly endearing itself to Clare supporters. I was thinking of Maggie Thatcher and one of her famous statements, ‘The lady is not for changing’. I said if I knew anything about Davy Fitzgerald, one of his great qualities is his stubbornness and I said ‘well, I know Davy is not for changing either’. But I would say they have tweaked the way they play.  Things that were going repeatedly wrong in matches, they certainly have eradicated most of those and we’ve seen a huge improvement in performance.
Seamus Hayes: I’d say if there was a short puck-out in Jackie’s time, The Duke [Seamus Durack] would have been sent home.
JOG: He wouldn’t do it anyway.
SH: There was no such thing as tactics like that then. You played to position. Throughout the games in the ’70s and even into the ’80s, teams played to position and hoped that things would work out.
HB: In a way, it’s his single-mindedness. Davy didn’t connect with many people and what they were saying. He stuck to what he believed in himself. Sure, weren’t people looking for his head after the Cork match? He had not a notion of changing. We all can see that he has adapted it but he hasn’t changed it.
SM: I think the play isn’t as short. That has definitely changed.
CL: There’s a calmness, a composure and a confidence in them that belies their years. To play the game that they’re playing, you’d say this is what an experienced team with two All-Irelands behind them would be playing. It’s high risk and requires a huge amount of confidence and skill to be able to do it because if it goes wrong, it looks terrible. Certainly, in the last two games, the Clare performances have been absolutely brilliant. Way above everything that we’ve seen all year. If you had said to me three months ago that Clare would be in an All-Ireland hurling final, I’d have said ‘not the way they’re going this year’. But, certainly, the progress they have made in the Galway and Limerick games has been phenomenal.
SM: Their skill levels are unbelievable. They’re fantastic hurlers, from McInerney right out.
CL: They’re not alone playing very well but they’re leaders on the field in the way they play. Podge Collins didn’t start the game against Waterford but since then, he has become a central player in our forward line. He’s 21 years of age and he’s almost the conductor of the orchestra of the forward line. You look at David McInerney in his first full year playing senior championship, hurling at full-back. He’s playing like Brian Lohan played in his heyday.
JOG: They’re expressing themselves very well. Pat Donnellan was given the job to be the sweeper. In olden times, if you got the job as sweeper that was your job. But he had the gumption to leave his position and run 50 yards down to the wing-forward position in the first five minutes of the match against Limerick. He had the confidence to abandon ship and go for it.
SH: They mix the short with the long and they’re so fit now. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Podge Collins being hit. You’d be looking down at a game, you’d see someone coming and you’d close your eyes. You’d say ‘he’ll never again get up’. You’d open your eyes and there’d be two other fellas on the ground and he’d be gone.
HB: The short puck-out started with Donal Óg [Cusack] and the back that got it cleared it. But Clare took that another step in that the back that got it passed it to another back. I think that’s where people got fierce critical, when that started to break down. Like the Cork match this year sure…
JOG: There were about seven Cork points got from turnovers. But that time, Clare were inclined to be playing the ball more to the man. They’re now playing it into the space and the man is coming onto it. At the start, it was ‘put it into my hand’ and when it broke down, they were caught. They’re all on the move now. It’s going slightly ahead of them and they’re picking it on the go.

Are there any match-ups between the ’90s and the current team that could get interesting?
CL: I’d love to see Seánie chasing Podge around the field. I’m sure he’d be delegating that job to somebody else. He’d be calling back Jamesie.
SM: I’d play the sweeper role!
CL: I’d like to see Colin Lynch and Tony Kelly having 70 minutes or Ollie Baker on Colm Galvin. They would be four fantastic players, with a different skill set, on each other. I think that would make for a very interesting 70 minutes.

Has preparation come on since the ’60s and’70s, O’Connell asked?

SH: I remember going to a Division 2 League game up in Castletowngeoghan. On arrival, Seamus Durack and a number of the players had to go onto the pitch, find shovels and a few brushes and clear out the goalmouth. Nowadays, the boys arrive at training, sit in the same seat, their togs, socks and towel, everything is there for them. Has it gone too far?
JOG: We loved it the way it was. Every other county was exactly the same as us. There was no-one training three nights a week or at 6 o’clock in the morning. I remember our good friend Tom Mac [Crusheen] being a selector one time. He came in with a manure bag over his shoulder that was full of hurleys. He threw the bag down in the middle of the floor and he said ‘lads, I want to be able to roll this [manure bag] up and put it in my pocket on the way home’. In other words, don’t spare them.
HB: The way society has changed, all of the big institutions have been falling one by one, from banks to Church to governments. Sport has become so crucial to keep people together, that I’d say it nearly had to evolve. Where it’s going to end though is another thing. How much further can you bring it from where it is now is a huge question?  The first year that I had the Clare team, I had it on my own. No selectors, no coach, no trainer. We moved from that to selectors, from that to Colum Flynn and to Justin McCarthy. The concept of a coach was a fierce new concept that time. John Hanly did a bit of it in the 1960s but that was it.
JOG: It all started, I’d say, with Ger’s [Loughnane] team. Ger raised the bar with this morning training. Kilkenny and everyone else looked around and said ‘this fella is a lunatic’. Then they all started buying into it, rugby became professional and all sports moved along. It kind of coincided with the Celtic Tiger, where fellas were working, had a middling car and a handy house and they were happy enough. Then, all of a sudden, we all wanted to be millionaires. Now we all want to win the All-Ireland. If Clare don’t win the All-Ireland this year and we know they have gone farther than we ever expected to, fellas will say ‘ah, they’re no good. They’ll never win it now’. That’s not true. They should be given a better chance as sportsmen to try, fail and go again. Watch now on All-Ireland day, the boys on the telly will analyse it from the colour of his hair to the tops of his toes. If he doesn’t look right and he’s playing bad it’s because he didn’t look right. It’s gone to that level and I’m kinda sad about it.

Would many lads from the 1970s cut it today?
JOG: There’s probably a few guys from our time that could play with this team. Johnny McMahon, Liam Danagher, Johnny Callinan. Those type of guys.
HB: What about yourself?
JOG: I’d say us guys, we’d be given the key to the dressing room and told lock it on the way out. Danagher and fellas like him were fantastic hurlers and The Puddin’ [Jimmy Cullinan] was probably the best hurler in Ireland. They wouldn’t be out of place in today’s game if they were getting the same kind of training.
HB: There was a huge swell towards the team in the ’70s. We played in three league finals and won two of them. For Clare, that was fairly serious work. We played, in all in that decade, in five Munster finals. In ’77 and ’78 we were playing, without any doubt, one of the best Cork teams that ever played. No-one doubts that, I’d say. We lost narrowly to them so Clare weren’t a mile away in the ’70s. It brought a huge swell, I felt, of support and a good bit of pride back into Clare hurling.
SH: The Doc McGrath, Lord have mercy on him, told me about one of the famous games in Thurles. There was a drink ban on before the game and it changed yer routine [Jackie and Noel Casey]. Both of ye, he said, were struggling a bit in the first half. He gave ye a little sip at half-time and both of ye had stormers in the second half.
JOG: That’s a tall tale! Doc McGrath was an absolutely lovely man. One day we were beaten and I said to him ‘well Doc, what do you reckon now?’ ‘I’ll tell you one thing now, Jackie,’ he said, ‘nice guys marry nice girls but they don’t win Munster finals. And to be fair to ye, ye all married lovely girls.’ He was one lovely man.

What do you remember of the 1986 Munster final against Cork in Killarney?
CL: Jackie was a selector and Fr Harry. Two players that played particularly well that day were Tommy Guilfoyle and Gerry McInerney. We were unlucky to lose. I remember the real disappointment for me was when I went to the All-Ireland final that year. Cork beat Galway convincingly. That’s when I felt the real pain of having lost the Munster final. That Clare team was the end of the great team of the ’70s. Ger [Loughnane] was still playing, John Callinan was still playing, Seán Stack and Seán Hehir were playing. Tommy Keane was captain. Seamie Fitz, Syl Dolan and Jim McInerney were playing.
SH: That was the summer Seán Stack was travelling over and back from Canada for the games. Because of emigration laws, he had to take a different route home every time.
CL: The biggest loss we had that year was Tony Nugent, who emigrated. If Tony Nugent had stayed around, I often thought about it, we’d have won the Munster final. Fr Harry, you said mass that morning. You prayed for PJ Moroney because he lost his shirt playing poker the night before. Do you remember that?
HB: I do.
CL: Magow [Gerry McInerney] organised a poker match at the team meeting the night before. Obviously, PJ came out the wrong end of it. I remember Seamie Fitz stayed in the same room as I did. He didn’t sleep a wink that night and he kept me awake as well. He was counting sheep until 4 o’clock in the morning.
HB: One of the few times that Clare would have beaten Cork was in ’81. Stack had an absolute blinder on Pat Horgan’s father.
SH: While it’s great for supporters, do any of ye feel that the way it’s gone now, it’s leading to maybe the death knell of the club scene? The parish team rarely sees their star players. It is going down the road of club rugby, where someone will make a county panel and be no longer available to their club?
CL: Clonlara were relegated this year out of Division 1 of the league because they didn’t have their county players. What is that saying to clubs? Is the reward they’re getting for producing county players that we only see them playing for their county and then they can’t play for their club? We need a serious look at fixtures. We played our first club championship match on May 14. The next match won’t be played until the end of September. I think this year, you have to say, Clare didn’t expect that they would be in the All-Ireland final but given the projection for the future, we have to look at it differently.
SM: I 100% agree with that. We have a major problem in Clare with the fixtures. Tipp had five championship matches played before they played the first round of Munster Championship. Mayo, three weeks ago, had their quarter-final [football] fixtures. It’s not just this year. Ever year Clare are nearly the last county to play county championship final. It’s madness. We’re out of the All-Ireland after two games for the last two or three years. It’s absolutely madness. From May, June there should be matches. And as well as that, if the worst comes to the worst and it does in some way interfere with the county team, they have the second chance. They’re into the qualifiers. I don’t know who is responsible for it. Whether it’s clubs, county board, the fixtures committee or whoever it is. But it’s something we just have to sort out.
HB: For the long haul, I think that’s a hugely major issue. Already a lot of clubs are hit with population shifts. The bulk of the population is down the main road here. You have the ’Bridge, Newmarket, Shannon and Cratloe with the population but out my country, East Clare, they’ve to amalgamate three clubs, nearly, now to put out a team. The second major issue is if we neglect the club, we’ll pay for it in the long term. There is no doubt about it, we might have the short-term success but we’ll definitely play a huge price down the road.
SM: To be fair, it probably started in ’95 when everything went on hold. Even that year, we had two four-week breaks and two five-week breaks and there was no [club championship] game played until the week after the All-Ireland. You could say, that was ’95 and ’97 was something similar. But I remember 2004, our first year with Dalo and Fr Harry. We got hammered by Waterford in the first round of the championship. We were beaten by 19 points and we had to wait seven weeks for a qualifier game. Seven weeks and the draw for the county championship wasn’t even made. Every county player would have loved to go back to the club and play two or three clubs matches. We’re going to have to bite the bullet. They can do it in every other place, I can’t see why we can’t do it. It has to be made to work. Maybe there will be a bit of pain along the way to make it work but we have to because it’s utterly failing at the moment.
CL: I’d say clubs that voted for a break this summer will have a look at it. I know our club [Ruan] did. Having no championship match from May to September hasn’t helped us and I’d say we’re like so many other clubs. Club officers, county board officers have to take a stand. County board officers will have to say, ‘lads this isn’t working’. If a system isn’t agreed, I think that system will have to be imposed.
JOG: Cyril, why would your club have voted for the long break? A lot of clubs have done that and I’m confused.
CL: I really don’t know why. Looking back now, I don’t see the sense in it. I thought at the end of June, there was an opportunity to play a round. There were provisional dates at the end of June and certainly, looking back on it now, that should have been played.
SH: I’d say it wasn’t a hurling decision. It was like everything in this country; it was a political decision in that certain people wanted it changed and canvassing went on behind the scenes. The right people in one way, the wrong people in another way, were canvassed. They cast their vote at a meeting and. in many cases, a lot of clubs did not know what was being voted on at the meeting or what way they were voting. The decision to cancel the provisional date in June was taken at a county board meeting in Scariff at the beginning of that month. That was taken on the argument that clubs wanted certainty. At that stage, it depended on Clare getting to a Munster final. They hadn’t played the semi-final. As of now, there’s a new format in the championship next year. It’s back to just one second chance. The group system is gone. It’s the exact same as the football.
JOG: Did ye hear Anthony Nash, the Cork goalie, the night they played Dublin? He said ‘we’re back to the club now next week’. I bought The Examiner and the whole lot of them were playing. We can’t do that for some reason.
SH: At the Cork press day, a point made by Johnny Crowley to me, was that after they beat Dublin, they didn’t see the players for nine days. They came back on the Tuesday night for training. In counties like Clare, the most there has been of separation of county and club training would be a day or two.
SM: Cork are probably used to it and going back 40 years that was probably the set-up. In Clare, getting to an All-Ireland final is rare enough but the hope would be that we’ll be in plenty of them in the next five or 10 years. We have to be able to account for that.
HB: The implication of this bunch of very young fellas being around for the foreseeable future has to be looked at in terms of county and club. You can’t keep repeating this down the road. By the time four or five years come, clubs are gone. They’re decimated.

In the ’90s Seánie, ye saw a lot of Shannon Airport?
SM: The first time we flew to Dublin was for the All-Ireland semi-final in ’95. We heard that Limerick had the flight chartered before the Munster final. So we took their flight going up or so we were told. It was great because you could stay at home the night before. You’d be getting up at a reasonable hour. You’d be awake anyway with excitement. I think we met in the West County and got the bus from there down to the airport. Straight in some back gate at the airport, onto the plane and we were above in Dublin at 10.30am. Then we had the breakfast. The fry, the whole whack. Then we went to bed for a couple of hours. It was a great way to do it.
JOG: That wasn’t the first. We flew to Belfast in about 1981.
SH: There was a H Block protest. I remember a lot of us were shaking before we got on the bus because it was fairly touchy the same day. There was a county board meeting on the Tuesday night after it. Before the meeting finished, Tom Harvey from Inagh, Lord have mercy on him, stood up and said he wanted to give a brief account of his trip to ‘the capital of occupied Ireland’. He branched into a line or two of Irish and somebody asked ‘what’s he saying?’ ‘I mean to say,’ he said, ‘this is an Irish organisation and if you only have the cúpla focal you should use them’. Aidan Tuttle (RIP) was sitting at the back of the hall and he said, ‘correct, suigh síos’. That finished that discussion.
JOG: I remember we also went up to Antrim in ’71. It was the first day The Duke [Seamus Durack] played in goals. We stayed in Dundalk the night before. The Troubles were in full swing. It wasn’t too far off Bloody Sunday. We were stopped and a small little solider of about 18 came into the bus. The cratur was terrified himself. He had a gun. Vincey [Murphy], God be good to him, was on the bus. Paschal [O’Brien] says to Vincey ‘put out your IRA medals now and show them to that young man’. We thought we’d all be shot. We couldn’t go down through the Protestant area. They opened the gates in Casement Park. There were soldiers outside and they closed the gates again. It was the very same as being in Cusack Park. There were kids hurling. You’d think you were in another world and outside the gate there was war.

Can Clare win it on Sunday, lads, O’Connell asked.
SM: The way they’ve been progressing in the last couple of games would give me great confidence that the game is there for us to win. I just think we need to improve a bit on our own puck-out. When we played Cork in the Gaelic Grounds, we were badly beaten on our own puck-out. Being beaten under your own puck-out means the ball is coming back down the other end of the field. Cork have very sharp forwards and they’ll take a lot of chances if they get them. But I think there’s a great sense of freedom about the way Clare are hurling. I remember from my own time, I had more nerves when I was older than when I was younger. They are good enough to win it. But we’re literally not going to be able to give away a free from the Cork 45’ out. We’re just going to have to be careful that we don’t give away too many frees because Cork will punish us.
CL: If we concede as many frees as we conceded against Limerick, we won’t win the All-Ireland. I also think we need to be more lethal in front of goal. I know it’s difficult, two playing on three but you’d have to say that Conor McGrath and Darach Honan are above average players. If they get goals or if one of them plays particularly well, we’re going to win the All-Ireland. If you look at the last four All-Irelands, particularly Kilkenny v Tipperary, what’s required to win an All-Ireland final is your absolute best. Being good and very good isn’t enough anymore. I think you’ve to play out of your skin to win an All-Ireland. These lads are capable of doing that. What I remember from the 2002 final is the noise and the sense of helplessness on the sideline communicating with players [as manager]. There’s a huge trust in the players. You really have to depend on them. I know there’s a runner now but being able to shout at somebody and give instructions is out the window.
SM: You’re out on the field early. You have the parade, you’re meeting the President. But the important thing is that the game itself is to the forefront of the mind the whole time and that they don’t get side-tracked. I don’t think they will but a small thing can turn it. You just have to give yourself every chance.
HB: I would love to see the team connect a bit more with the supporters and with the clubs. I’d hate to see them too cut off from the wider public. That needs to happen. There was a feeling there during the summer that a lot of the supporters weren’t connecting with the team. We need to look at that and make sure that they do connect. It’s going to be huge if they win it. The expectation is so big now, we need to be careful as well. Jackie was saying earlier that if we lose it, there’ll be people going the other road quickly enough. The one thing I see about them is that this Clare team is very hard to play against. They’re coming in twos and threes. I’d be very hopeful that they can win it.
JOG: All-Irelands always swing on maybe some key man not performing and some unknown doing the business. Fergie Tuohy in the ’95 All-Ireland scored four points. It throws up a star and it makes a small man of a star. It can do that. Being from Clare, you don’t be always rational. The heart always says, ‘we’re going to win it’.