Tag Archives: senior football

‘You gave us hope. You made us dream. You filled us with confidence. The ultimate players’ manager. Thank you for everything Colm, you are a special man. As the old saying goes, we were never playing for Clare, we were playing for Colm Collins.’ Success is measured in many different ways and by many different metrics, depending on the county and on the code. So it is that we view the Clare football team through a very different prism than we do the hurlers, never mind comparing the Banner County with rivals from across the county boundary. For the hurlers a championship title is what they’re measured by – be it Munster or All-Ireland. Put simply, one of them is demanded and expected because of what the 1995-98 era gave us and what the bolt from the blue in ‘13 provided this generation and onto the next. It’s different for the footballers, even allowing for the fact that the big …

A veteran of Clondegad’s 1997 Junior B Championship win, Mikey Hehir is a manager with significant experience behind him. Now in his second stint at the helm of Clondegad, prior to that he managed Ballyea for three years. From Drumquin in Ballynacally, Hehir won two junior championships with Clondegad and played in two losing intermediate finals, before succumbing to a knee injury, having had an initial operation at 15. “Eventually the knee gave way. Every year it was getting harder and harder to come back. I started not making the team, so I got involved with the hurlers in Ballyea as a coach, about seven or eight years ago. As that year progressed, I ended up falling into the manager’s role. We had three relegation battles, one final and two semi-finals. We won two U-21 B in that period and the following year, when Robbie Hogan, Raymond O’Connor and Donal Kelly came in, they won the U-21 A. It was …