O’CONNOR ‘WOULD HAVE QUIT’ —
CLARE joint manager Gerry O’Connor revealed that he was heading for the exit door if the senior hurling team had lost the recent roundrobin game to Tipperary and been knocked out of the Championship.
He made no bones about the high stakes in that crucial fourth round game which turned on Tipperary substitute Jake Morris hitting the post at one end and Ian Galvin rattling home a Clare goal at the other, less than 20 seconds later.
On such fine margins management careers hang with Donal Moloney in the same boat as the other half of the sideline double act. From that point, a resurgent Clare won emphatically at Ennis in round five against Munster’s form team Limerick to set up this Sunday’s final at Semple Stadium.
‘There’s no point in saying we weren’t under pressure coming into that Tipperary game,’ said O’Connor. ‘I think it’s fair to say Donal and myself would have faded into the background because we had a two-year contract and I couldn’t see that being renewed and I couldn’t see an appetite within us to continue either.
‘You get involved in this to try and replicate the success you had at underage level, see are you up to the challenge and basically you surround yourself with good people.
‘The big difference between this year and last year is that three or four people have come into the management/backroom team and made a huge difference.’
The pair were to the forefront of Clare’s underage success story and the historic hat-trick of AllIreland Under 21 titles. After an unsatisfying loss to Cork in last year’s Munster final and a similar defeat in the first round of this year’s new round-robin system, he said the four-match group has helped Clare reconnect with the supporters who stayed away the first day.
‘Cork is a fair distance for Clare people to get to. A lot of the Clare supporters are family people and they’ve got young kids and there’s a significant cost attached to travelling down to Cork. I think they more or less hedged their bets and said, “You know what, we’re going to have two home games and Thurles is almost a home game for Clare people.” I think there was a massive reconnection with the Clare supporters in Cusack Park and that’s why this format has been fantastic for Clare because those two matches gave us a massive opportunity to reconnect with our supporters.
‘Once we got over Waterford, there was a massive Clare crowd in Thurles when you consider we were on the sideline looking over at the new stand as the parade went on and a huge Clare crowd erupted with noise and volume. Whether we like it or not, there are supporters in every county but they will come out to support you when you start winning. It doesn’t matter whether it’s football, whether it’s Munster rugby, whether it’s Irish rugby, you have to put a good product in place before people buy your product.’
He admits they got the focus wrong last year, to the extent that his son Niall had to apologise to Cork’s Anthony Nash after throwing a bag of the keeper’s sliotars into the Killinan End terrace before throw-in. With former Cork goalkeeper Dónal Óg Cusack part of the Clare backroom team then, and Clare preoccupied with Nash’s impact, the extent of Cusack’s influence was a subject of discussion. He has since moved on and O’Connor explained: ‘The main difference is that this year we’ve focused exclusively on ourselves rather than the opposition. We’ve added really good people to our backroom team but the biggest single change from our perspec-
tive is that the players have taken ownership and responsibility for the whole project. They lead the analysis, they lead the team talks. They look at the opposition and come back to us and they outline where they see their opportunities.
‘Because the players are the guys out there, they are the experts and they understand the opposition far better than we do. We take the feedback on board, we go to the coaches and the coaches implement a gameplan and a training regime based on what the players want. Ultimately, there’s no point players in the heat of a Championship match looking towards the sideline for inspiration because we’ve got to create an environment where they all become leaders and communicate throughout the game.’