The sheer scale of Clare's subjugation of Tipperary in Saturday's Guinness Munster hurling semi-final replay seemed to shock the champions. It was as if their total superiority had brought home the uncomfortable implications of the drawn match six days previously: that a much inferior team had almost eliminated them.

This was one of Clare's top-drawer performances. All the passion and power which had been missing in the drawn match returned and the consequences were devastating for Tipperary. Individual displays had some bearing on the turnaround. Clare's players, with hardly an exception, improved their game, whereas Tipperary's were unable to sustain the heroics of the drawn match.

With a touch more discipline Clare could have won this by double the margin. In the final quarter they managed only two points and became so loose that at times Eamonn Corcoran at left wing back for Tipperary looked like an extra man so much time did he have to take ball and strike it back up the field.

Tactically, Clare had absorbed the lessons of near-defeat and comprehensively out-thought their opponents. Tipperary's line made things hard for themselves with a couple of odd decisions. Having opted to give Declan Ryan the cattle-prod treatment by withdrawing him from the starting line-up, the management left John Leahy on for the entire match.

Yet the only effect he was having on proceedings was to maintain Clare's defence in a fired-up state of motivation as he proceeded from one mindless niggle to another with Liam Doyle and, later, Brian Quinn.

So abysmal was Tipperary's afternoon that they managed only two points from play, one from Tommy Dunne and the other from Eddie Enright, whose reward for upsetting this unproductive ecosystem was substitution. Clare, meanwhile, hit 1-13 from play.

From the start, Clare were irresistible. Their pre-match changes worked out perfectly. As expected, Stephen McNamara's selection was a dummy and Enda Flannery came in on the 40. Jamesie O'Connor went into the left corner and then drew Donncha Fahy out to around centrefield.

At first glance, this was puzzling. Fahy had looked very vulnerable in the drawn match when exposed to Barry Murphy's pace. It seemed odd to bring him out the field rather than isolating him in the company of O'Connor, who would have been unlikely with a similar supply of opportunities to draw as many blanks as Murphy had.

Overall the point was made because Fahy had quite a good match in the more central location. O'Connor didn't have a great match and disaster struck after 25 minutes when he was badly injured in a scrum of players. Unable to take the ensuing free, he carried an injured arm for a few minutes before being substituted.

Clare's strong attacking performance was all the more creditable for being delivered in the absence of their best forward. The rest of the attack went about their business briskly. Murphy was a menace at full forward, Markham burned it up on the wing and the versatile Flannery gave a welcome solidity to the centre-forward position.

Aside from his greater physical presence - Niall Gilligan had struggled to impose himself on David Kennedy in the drawn match - Flannery was also at the sharp end of Clare's primary tactical measure. Manager Ger Loughnane said afterwards that they had determined Kennedy shouldn't be allowed to influence the game to the extent he had in the drawn match.

Accordingly, Flannery pulled the Tipperary centre back away from his 40 in a strategy which worked particularly well. Their defensive structure distorted, the challengers had no answer to the traditional power and pace of Clare's forwards.

Yet despite this forward puissance, it was centrefield which gained the plaudits. Colin Lynch and Ollie Baker were the first names on people's lips in the Clare dressing-room. Baker's return from injury was a huge boost to morale and he showed his importance by standing his ground in the cockpit. His physical presence always seems to suck the strength from opposing pairings, and neither Enright nor Conor Gleeson had the same impact on the match as they had enjoyed the first day.

But it was the impact on Colin Lynch's game which was most noticeable. Lynch played well enough the previous weekend, but with his regular partner back in harness he had his best match for Clare since 1997, when he was a strong contender for Hurler of the Year.

On Saturday he was able to crash through Tipp's ragged defences and was good value for his four-point tally from play.

In terms of scoring, a burst of 1-3 in two minutes killed off the match. Central to it was Alan Markham's goal in the eighth minute. Fergal Heaney fumbled an attempted clearance and Murphy was in along the endline like a flash. His raked pass across the front of goal was turned into the net by Markham, who added a point within a minute.

The currency by which Tipp stayed even vaguely in touch was the free-taking of Dunne, who stoically struck over nine frees and missed only one. Declan Ryan came on after half an hour and improved the attack. In the second half, he blasted a 20-metre free into the net in the 56th minute, and nine minutes later had a similar effort deflected.

On neither occasion was the match really at issue. The goal chance which could have had some sort of an influence came in the 29th minute when a Dunne solo sent in Liam Cahill for a shot which was blocked out as far as Brian O'Meara. His effort was stopped by Anthony Daly.

In general, the losers had neither the space nor the supply of serviceable ball to make an impact on a Clare defence where Sean McMahon was back in assertive form - underlined by his haul of five points from long-range frees.

The full-back battles of the drawn match were not re-enacted as Cahill and Paul Shelly made no headway with the Lohan brothers. Shelly's most visible act was to clip Davy Fitzgerald, presumably in retribution for the goalkeeper's clash with him at the start of the match.

Referee Dickie Murphy, as usual, repaid the faith of the appointments committee by keeping good order - with the help of a vigilant Pat Aherne on the line - in a match which occasionally threatened to boil over. By the provisions of his own eclectic rule-book, two players were booked in a match during which more conventional law-enforcers might have thinned the playing population a bit.