Clare Medocrity

ballykev

Since the year 2000 Clare’s record in Munster Championship hurling has been abysmal. During this period Tipperary have met Clare on eight occasions, with Clare only emerging victorious once in 2003. Tipperary defeated Clare in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009 and just last Sunday. After every defeat the reaction was the same. Clare did well, fought the good fight but came up short, but will prove dangerous to anyone they meet via the backdoor. While this argument held a certain amount of credence when greats of the game such as Brian Lohan, Lynch and Mc Mahon graced the team, the same cannot be said anymore, which makes the positive reaction to Clare’s defeat throughout Clare’s local media all the more puzzling. Year after year Clare are beaten again and again by the same team and the reaction is always the same, ‘The boys did great’, ‘they’re only young’ and ‘give them a chance’. There seems to be no such thing as constructive criticism in Clare, on the rare occasion when anyone criticises the team it is mistook for negativity, in colloquial parlance such people are called ‘cutters’. The realisation that a team often needs to be criticised in order to improve doesn’t seem to exist in Clare. Thus because the Clare players are never really criticised for their inadequacies and are perennially lauded for their failings they see no reason to improve.

What this conveniently ignores of course is the obvious fact that Clare are delighted to lose. Last year in reflecting on the defeat to Waterford in the Munster semi-final, a game Clare should have won, Donal Tuohy in an interview with the Clare Champion admitted that many of the Clare players in his own words ‘would have been happy with their performance’. Such a confession was incredible considering that Clare had the winning of that game and that the prize was a place in the Munster final against a completely overrated Cork team. Yet such inertia is what prevails in the Clare county team, an acceptance of mediocrity and security in the knowledge that they did their best yet fell short once again. This was exactly the attitude that arose in the aftermath of Clare’s most recent defeat to Tipperary, that Clare are young and that they will prove their potential in the future and that they are hampered by not playing in Division 1, all such arguments that are highly dubious. Thus the consistent failure that Clare have experienced at the hands of Tipperary is ignored, something that wouldn’t happen in any other county. Also it is fair to say that the performances of the county team do not justify the vast sums that are spent on the team throughout the year. It is difficult to imagine where a massive sum of almost 370,000 went on training two teams (football & hurling) that are eliminated from the championship every year in July. Considering that the teams have only been training collectively since January more or less the cost of 62,000 a month seems highly exorbitant. Money is spent like confetti it would appear and failure is disguised as building for the future.

The argument that Clare is a young team has been put forward in recent days to explain Clare’s most recent capitulation. However what this argument ignores is the fact that Tipperary is also a young team. Brendan Maher, Paraic Maher, Noel McGrath to name three all played in the U21 Munster Hurling Final last year against Clare and were three stalwarts in last year’s march to the All Ireland, with Brendan Maher winning the Young Hurler of the Year, while Clare’s great white hope, Honan, still coasts on the comparatively insignificant success of scoring two great goals against Galway in the 2009 U21 All Ireland semi-final in Thurles; long since water under the bridge. While Noel McGrath was somewhat subdued on Sunday, Paraic Maher was outstanding; meting out a similar punishment to John Conlon that he gave him in the aforementioned U21 Munster Hurling Final in Thurles last year, where Conlon hardly won a ball off Maher for the duration of the game, eventually being moved off him. At the moment Maher is the best hurler in the country and is odds on to win hurler of the year if he maintains the incredible intensity of his performances. Conlon’s incredibly poor work-rate is certainly no match for Maher’s incredible physicality and skill, shown by his two exquisite scores.

In essence Maher’s star is in the ascendant and Conlon’s is on the wane, with two of his three scores coming when the game was effectively over as a contest. It is hard to see the nature of this demographic changing anytime soon. Yet the players are the same age and Maher will always be there to devour Conlon. Even on Sunday it was obvious from Conlon’s demeanour that Maher’s superiority over him is not exclusively physical but is also psychological. There were a number of occasions in the first half in particular when the Clare forward could have come to the aid of his colleagues yet decided to stay on the margins until it was too late and it was inevitable that the ball would be cleared. Even when Tipperary were struggling in the first quarter of an hour Maher was outstanding, showing his intent as early as the first minute when felling Fergal Lynch with a powerful shoulder. Incredibly he contributed more to Tipperary’s forward play than a number of the forwards, in particular Eoin Kelly who if Brennan hadn’t dropped his trademark clanger would have contributed very little from open play.

Even Kelly’s goal came from a long Maher clearance into the Clare goalmouth. Thus while Clare make excuses for their young team, Maher drives Tipperary onwards. Clare will say that it is easier for Maher and his colleagues to ease into a successful team. However this argument seems to be a bit disingenuous to the effect that Maher and his colleagues have made. A lot of analysts speak of the fact that when Maher and company arrived on the scene the spine of the present team was there, an argument that has a certain amount of truth in it. However the team was not successful as some have suggested; Tipperary hadn’t contested an All-Final since 2001, Lar Corbett and Eoin Kelly had been around since 2001, Cummins ever present since the mid 1990s more or less with the exception of a brief interregnum during the strange Babs Keating era where even Kelly was dropped in place of the cumbersome Egan. Thus if Tipperary were so successful why did they not contest a final between the years 2001 and 2009? The answer is the players that were the difference in last year’s final, Paraic Maher, his namesake Brendan and Noel McGrath, who got through much of the hard graft that allowed Corbett to give Kilkenny the coup de grace. These players are the same age more or less as those that are lining out for Clare. Yet the sycophants that follow Clare proclaim after every defeat that they are young and that we’re building for the future, while for Tipperary the future is now. The problem for Clare as in the past is that the future might never come.

Another problem related to Conlon’s ineffectiveness is the poor physical condition of the team as a whole, which resembles a club rather than a county team. Even before half-time it was obvious that a number of Clare players had tired alarmingly and that they were running on empty. That Clare should have tired so quickly is an indictment of the trainer and management. To train for six months and only be able to last for one half is incredible in the modern game. Fiach O’Loughlin, the Clare trainer should realise that the level of fitness required for inter-county hurling is far above that of club hurling in Clare, a level that is pedestrian at best, where he has made his name. How the management team don’t realise this basic fact is mystifying. Tipperary could have played for another seventy minutes. Yet the only real substitution that Clare made was to replace O’Connell with Donovan, a change that was forced because O’Connell could run no more. This is the elephant in the room. Clare are streets behind in terms of athleticism and fitness, yet this problem doesn’t seem to be addressed because many of the Clare players don’t seem to be too bothered whether they win or lose and are only interested in the status that being on the county panel brings them, which brings us to the figure of Honan.

For almost the whole game Honan remained on the field, despite it being totally obvious to almost everyone in the ground that he was totally ineffective. On a number of occasions the ball broke to him around the goalmouth, a sharper forward would have pounced on it; Honan however is totally ambivalent about fighting for a ball. On one occasion in the first half after Cummins had saved Cathal McInerney’s shot, the ball eventually came to Honan who preceded to kick the ball to Maher who duly obliged by sending the ball seventy metres down the field. All Honan had to do was get one ball and stick it in the net and then Tipperary would have had to watch two forwards, something that would surely have freed up McGrath. In a nutshell Honan throughout the game was embarrassing and his feeble attempts at attempting to win the ball were castigated by both sets of supporters. When both sets of supporters agree on the poor performance of a player there is something seriously wrong. Honan seems to believe that he has a divine right to be on the starting team despite the fact that he is still incredibly one sided, almost always turning on his left when he receives possession and has an inability and unwillingness to fight for his own ball. Even in club games his form has declined considerably, which brings me to the final point. How was Honan left on the field?

In this instance the management has serious questions to answer. On a number of occasions Honan got in the way of the only effective Clare forward, Conor McGrath. He was more or less an ornament, hardly moving throughout the game from the edge of the square, yet he was left on until it was almost time to go home. It is difficult to justify such a decision on the part of the Clare management. Surely if Colin Ryan was introduced at half-time he would have won at least a couple of balls and been an assistance to the increasingly suffocated McGrath, who Tipperary quickly realised was Clare’s only threat. That Honan was not taken off sooner was an abdication of duty on the part of the Clare Management. Rather than give out about the referee as O’Loughlin did afterwards it would be more advisable for him to look at his own failings and only worry about what he can control. A final point, when Has James McInerney ever scored a 21 yard free? When did a centre back ever score a goal from a 21 yard free in the championship? An example doesn’t immediately spring to mind. A forward should have taken such a chance, which if scored could have completely changed the complexion of the final moments of the game and Colin Ryan had just been introduced and considering that he has scored them for his club as recently as the last club match surely he was the man to take such an opportunity, especially when one considers how close he came to scoring a harder free in similar circumstances in 2009. What this incident shows is that the Clare management team as strange as it might seem don’t know a whole lot about the game of hurling.