Underdogs well prepared

IF LIMERICK were somehow fooled into thinking they already had one foot in the Munster football final then Frank Doherty offers a few words of caution: “I remember in 2004 people were saying that The Loup only had to turn up to beat Caltra in an All-Ireland club semi-final. As things turned out it went the other way. Never underestimate the underdog, as the man says.”

Doherty was manager of that Caltra side which went on to win the All-Ireland, and he’ll be hoping for a similar sort of upset on Sunday when his Clare team take on Limerick at Cusack Park in Ennis. The Galway native is in his second year as manager, and while the rest of the country might reckon Clare are without hope, he certainly isn’t.

“I’m sure Limerick have been looking at a Munster final,” he says, “but they’ll have to put in 70 minutes of work to beat Clare first of all. Our preparations have gone quite well. We’ve had seven or eight weeks since the league just to focus on this game.

“Some teams like to go on weekends away and so on, but we just knuckled down, without any distractions, and focused entirely on this game, and the winners of Limerick and Tipperary . . . I do know we’ll have to play to the best of our ability to beat them.”

When the Munster Council reverted to the open draw – and Kerry and Cork ended up in the same half of it – it offered the likes of Limerick, Tipperary and Clare some relief. But given Clare’s poor form of recent years, Limerick’s quarter-final meeting with Tipperary was billed by some as the semi-final, and that the winners were effectively into the final.

What Clare do have in their favour, beyond home advantage, is that Doherty has a full-strength team – provided full back Conor Whelan and forward Michael O’Shea recover from recent injuries.

Limerick will again be able to call on dual stars Stephen Lucey and Mark O’Riordan. Forward Stephen Kelly, however, is still ruled out with a broken hand.