Saturday afternoon began in flowers for Jamesie O'Connor. Around him he could feel that his team were back in the zone that have made them the most powerful force in the GAA in the last five years. They scored 1-4 before they had a wide. Singing. They kept the game hopping along, kept Tipp guessing.

Saturday evening ended in the hospital. Jamesie O'Connor and Davy Fitzgerald, two honest heroes of hurling, left Pairc Ui Chaoimh together in an ambulance. Fitzgerald thought his wrist was broken from a slap of a hurl early in the game. O'Connor was in the hospital overnight. They operated on the main bone in his arm, inserting a steel plate, and they added two stitches over one eye.

Jamesie O'Connor is one of those players that no team should be without. Honest, consistent, hard-working. There have been days when Clare have been bad and Jamesie has pulled them through, booming over the points. And days when Clare are good and O'Connor is the sparkler letting out white light. Saturday was the first time he has broken a bone.

Versions of how O'Connor's right arm came to need a steel plate in it will differ. Those close to the player remember him being tripped from behind while getting a challenge from the side and having a couple of players pile in on him. The bone went somewhere in the later stages of that sequence. Earlier, somebody had caught him late with a hurley just above the eye, coming in from the side. Felt it before he saw it.

Clare won't be complaining too much this week. They know enough about the ways of the world and their own bouncer reputation to feel that silence is the better part of diplomacy.

Yet there are things going on in hurling which must be examined.

Last year a Cork player was racially abused by a Clare player. This year at least one Clare player listened to over an hour's worth of abuse about his wife from his immediate opponent. Needle is too readily converted to nastiness in the secret history of games.

The jolt of Saturday afternoon was the dark physicality which Tipperary brought to the party. Nobody is saying that a team with Ollie Baker and Colin Lynch in the engine room are models of latter-day victimhood, but the intent of some of the challenges coming in from Tipp seemed reckless from the start.

Last weekend Tipperary had hurled Clare confidently and well. Their sweet assurance was sufficient to prompt consideration as to whether Clare had been as good as they were allowed to be or as good as they could be.

On Saturday, though, Tipperary set their sights lower. Right from the start, when Paul Shelly arrived late and wild across Davy Fitzgerald in the Clare goal, they seemed determined to prove a point that nobody was really interested in seeing proved.

Antagonism was everywhere. Liam Cahill and Frank Lohan seemed to have their own private beef all afternoon. John Leahy seemed to be in more general dispute with the world; his mood was peevish and ugly throughout. Even Conal Bonnar got flamefaced in the second half. Somehow the sight of Conor Clancy seemed to especially enrage Tipp players.

Dickie Murphy was of little help in the matter. Dickie has a unique style of refereeing which is even-handed and certainly produces good games, but which runs close to the line all the time.

He operates like one of those old style precinct cops who lets the illegal card games run and the brothels thrive and the hooch vendors prosper and grants the numbers runners safe passage, just so long as it never gets too messy and the boys from head office don't come down too hard.

It's all pretty and fluent to watch, but the boys who are waking up this morning with bruises and breaks deserve a little bit more protection. Tipp explored the limits of Dickie's tolerance on Saturday. Damage might have been done.

Through it all Clare hurled in the focused manner of masters. They won't be getting halos in the post this week, but their laser-like concentration was notable.

When the Meath footballers were at their prime in the late 1980s and very early 1990s, it was a fact of life, seldom grasped, that teams who bothered themselves with trying to match Meath's muscle usually made themselves dizzy. Dublin once famously left Dave Foran, a mid-fielder, on Mick Lyons, a full back, "because he was keeping Lyons quiet".

It is similar with Clare. Teams do best not to bother proving points about toughness. Robustness is part of what Clare are. They are the Volvos of hurling, built to survive almost any impact. A team can throw themselves feveredly at the Banner boys and it will seldom disrupt their serene concentration.

On Saturday, with Ollie Baker back steaming around the middle third of the field, there was room enough for Colin Lynch to submit his greatest performance yet in a Clare jersey. He was good in the drawn game but he was immaculate on Saturday.

So it went through the Clare lines. Players who struggled last week stood up this week. The better ones prospered. The absence of O'Connor for more than half the game would normally be a brake on Clare's ambition. On Saturday they scored 21 points and just one came off Jamesie's stick.

Everyone left Cork wondering. Nicky English found out more about himself as a manager in the space of two games than some managers do in the space of a career. He knows that on the first day he sent out a team, with the right tactics and the right peak of motivation. No small feat. Saturday was always going to be harder. He had no new blueprint. He pulled a Ger Loughnane stunt with his team selection. And he asked for the same again only harder and more of it. Wasn't to be.

Wondering. Now we know that Clare need a cattle prod of motivation to keep them whirling. They have escaped Munster and the question is how many big afternoons can they squeeze out of themselves.

Who knows?

In the hospital in Cork, meanwhile, they detained Jamesie O'Connor till yesterday afternoon. Preliminary guesses are that the injury will cost him six to eight weeks of hurling. Maybe less, maybe more. All those years of hurling and he's never broken a bone. Nobody knows how quickly he'll heal.

Two months of summer and he'll be on the sidelines. We have to stop and wonder about the game. If there is no room for the light-footed genius of a Jamesie O'Connor, do we have a game at all?