It is 30 years since Clare changed the championship, for good and forever. Ger Loughnane and his crew were disrupters. Everything they did was in a spirit of insubordination. They defaced tradition with their graffiti, they clashed with City Hall, they weaponised the airwaves, they butted heads with the establishment. They dared to be different and were ambivalent about your affections. They were punks.
In the midst of the mayhem, they trampled down boundaries. That was their gift to the game. Whatever you thought about their binge training, and their dummy teams, and their abrasive demeanour on the field, they challenged the orthodoxies and sacred cows that had framed the hurling championship for generations. They forced everyone to think again, even those counties who had a smug reliance on hand-me-down wisdom.
The hurling championship was not a fertile place for invention or for original thinkers but that’s what it became. After Clare, teams began to go rogue: short puck-outs, extra defenders, withdrawn attackers, isolated inside forwards, stacking the middle third, moving the ball through the lines, shooting from everywhere, lateral passing, back-passing to the goalie: ball to hand, ball to hand, ball to hand. Anything on the ground was Old Testament.
If you hit the ball up the field from behind your own 45 now there’s somebody with a laptop who can tell you the statistical probability of getting the ball back, even before the ball lands. Intercounty teams have more computers now than air traffic control. Hurling made that leap too, from analogue to digital.
For ideas, hurling became an import economy. That was the intellectual leap. Stuff from Gaelic football and bits and pieces from rugby, and other stuff from athletics, microdosing mostly. But all of that would have been unimaginable for generations. Hurling had a closed mind. In its sealed echo chamber, it was content with its own thoughts. Agreeing with itself.
Loughnane’s Clare thought differently. Whether you cared for it or not, it was independent thinking. Bolshie and fresh and subversive. They didn’t play the game the way it is played now because, since the late 1990s, the game has changed more often than the phone in your hand. But they challenged the status quo more than any other team since Wexford in the 1950s. That Wexford team were innovators too.
Hurling was persecuted by the status quo. Now, it’s gone. The numbers are not as spectacular as the change in mood, but the mood is intoxicating. In the last 30 years, 12 All-Irelands have been won by teams outside the so-called Big Three. In the 30 years before that, the number was just eight; in the previous 30 years, it was 7.
In the last 30 years there have been 21 All-Ireland finals that concerned at least one team from outside the Big Three; four of those finals excluded the Big Three entirely, and this, remember, in an era when Kilkenny produced the best, or second best, team of all time. That argument has not closed yet.
So, in the coming weeks, somebody will come up with something. Every year that Paul Kinnerk has been involved with Limerick he has changed an angle. Some of the previous year’s stuff was just wiped from the hard drive.
How Limerick recover from their failure to win five-in-a-row will be one of most compelling stories of the summer. Kilkenny’s response in 2011 was to win the All-Ireland again, but what is extraordinary looking back is how many changes they made.
Between the All-Ireland final of 2010 and 12 months later, the spine of the team had been completely refitted: different goalie, different full back and centre back, new centrefield partnership, different players at 11 and 14. TJ Reid had captained the team in the 2010 All-Ireland final and started the following year’s final on the bench. In terms of the personnel, a third of the team was swapped out.
In their All-Ireland winning years, one of Limerick’s great strengths was stability. For the championship, their first team was essentially drawn from 18 players. That comfort ended last year.
In the league, squad players were given the kind of auditions where they were allowed to fall down and get back up, like where Simon Cowell interrupts and asked the contestant if they have a second song.
Colin Coughlan, for example, who has been on the panel since he was a teenager in 2021, started five games in a row for the first time in his Limerick career. Adam English featured in every match and so did Eddie Stokes; Aidan O’Connor was groomed as an understudy to Tom Morrissey and Géaroid Hegarty, but also emerged as a present threat.
Limerick used 36 different players in the league, which, as Stephen Barry pointed out in the Evening Echo, was more than any other Munster county, and one more than Galway, a county in the throes of a root and branch rebuild.
Clare are in a slightly different position. They finished last season with nine thirtysomethings on their starting 15, which was more than any other team in the championship. All of them were load-bearing players; a couple of them are among the greatest players that Clare have ever produced; most of them have been on a hard road for more than a decade.
How much is left in them? Conor Cleary and David McInerney suffered from injuries during the spring, John Conlon and Cathal Malone struggled for form, Shane O’Donnell underwent surgery which might yet mean that he won’t appear this season; Peter Duggan came on at half-time against Cork and was sent off after 17 minutes, having tormented Eoin Downey in that time. That was the sum of his league campaign.
Twenty years ago, when Anthony Daly was Clare manager, he was faced with a similar dilemma, wondering if he should stick or twist with a battalion of hugely influential players who had slipped into their 30s: the two Lohans, Seanie McMahon, Ollie Baker, Davy Fitzgerald. In the event, only Baker fell out of favour.
Can Clare win the All-Ireland again without the 30-somethings driving them? Can they win it with Clare depending so heavily on them? All of them? Is there a viable middle ground?
Limerick checked out of the league with two games to go; Clare were never in it. Cork started the year as they meant to continue. Like every team that plans to win the league there must be an element of push and pull. Pat Ryan accomplished that impressively. Something was left in the fridge.
For the second year in a row Cork were the highest goal scorers in Division One of the league; they were also the top goalscorers in last year’s championship. Immediately after Cork lost the All-Ireland final, Pat Ryan bemoaned the goal chances they had failed to take. One way or another, Cork expect goals to make the difference. They have made that pledge to themselves.
The hubbub around a team playing with such charisma is inevitable. The notion of containment is risible. For Cork’s first home game against Tipperary next Sunday, the county board received four times as many ticket requests from clubs than they did for last summer’s do-or-die home game against Limerick.
These Cork players, though, experienced this feverishness in the second half of last summer’s championship too. Gary Keegan, the pre-eminent performance coach in Irish sport over the last 20 years, still has a guiding hand on their mental approach. They will be prepared to cope.
It is an historical quirk that the last three times Cork have won the National League, they were eliminated by Clare in the championship: 1981, 1993 and 1998. Neither team will be hobbled on Sunday. In three previous editions of the round robin system, Clare have lost their opening game and still reached the Munster final; in two editions, Cork have lost their opening two games and still qualified in third place.
What has emerged over five years of the format, though, is that the sequencing of fixtures is hugely consequential. Dublin, for example, could accumulate enough points to lock down third place, at least, before they meet Galway and Kilkenny. Waterford, on the other hand, have back-to-back home games in the space of seven days that will define their season.
Remarkably, 10 games in this year’s Leinster championship have been fixed for Saturday afternoons or early evening, which is bound to depress attendances. In vivid contrast, the Munster championship is expected to attract record crowds for the third year in a row.
In 2017, the last year of the old format – when there were only four games in the province – the average attendance was 32,000; this year, with 11 games, the average is expected to hit 30,000, at least. Whatever tall tales you may have heard about the Munster championship and its glorious past, it was never like this. Cherish this sunny day while it lasts.
Who wins? Nobody from Leinster. Probably not Clare. Limerick? Every chance. Cork.
