Lohan lost the run of himself and Clare paid price
CORK and Clare are the double acts on a bill that no-one wanted to headline this weekend. There was a time when losing in the first round of the Munster championship meant that it was all over for another year and if that feels like a format from the dark ages, whoever loses in Páirc Uí Chaoimh tomorrow would be advised to bring a torch with them as they will be strapped back into the time machine.
Okay, the smart boys with calculators will tell you that the losers would still have a chance – Cork made the All-Ireland series after losing both of their opening games in 2022 – but the smarter boys who know their hurling will tell you that whoever loses a second game inside a week will be gone.
More to the point, they deserve to be gone too. Cats may have nine lives, but hurling teams really shouldn’t.
The big question is which one limps into Páirc Uí Chaoimh tomorrow in the worst shape and I am going to call that one a draw.
Clare suffered the greater disappointment on the day in losing a game to Limerick they should have won three times over, but Cork may have the bigger issues to address in never looking like beating Waterford in the first instance.
This week in Clare you would not need to have your ear pressed to the ground to know, as far as their public is concerned, that the blame game is in full swing and there are no prizes as to who is getting it in the neck.
... but Banner’s nearly men can leave Cork staring into the abyss
SINCE Limerick’s emergence as the game’s superpower under John Kiely and Paul Kinnerk, I have never seen them outfought and out-thought as they were for 55 minutes last Sunday in Ennis.
Clare did everything right, they pressed right up on the champions, kept the aerial battles to a minimum and dictated the terms of engagement. They did more than enough to win but they didn’t.
They can point to a couple of brilliant saves by Nickie Quaid and a couple of umpiring errors that gifted Limerick two goals as an explanation of why they let a nine-point lead slip through their fingers.
But great saves and officiating errors are part and parcel of the game, and the only ones Clare have to blame are themselves.
And that is why Brian Lohan was the focus of so much attention all week after a day when ego trumped good sense. I like Lohan, he is normally grounded and pragmatic, but he lost the run of himself when Clare romped into that huge lead coming down the home stretch by bringing on Tony Kelly.
It felt almost like a flexing of the muscles, as if to say to Kiely, ‘look what we are doing to ye without our best man on the field’.
It will be argued that it was justified in that it made sense to get game-time into Kelly’s legs after the great man was sidelined for a long stretch of the year and that it would also elicit from the home supporters a roar that would give the team the kind of boost that would see them coast to the winning line.
There is another way of looking at that, though. When you have Limerick down and out, you go and find a wooden stake and drive it through their hearts. And when you have that done, you find another one and drive it in there too, just to be sure to be sure.
As for getting a lift from a crowd already buzzing at inflicting a deep wound to the champions, what Lohan may have not factored in is that his players could have seen Kelly’s introduction as a signal that their manager believed the game was done and that the final quarter was an extended warm-down ahead of the Cork match.
In that final quarter, they got distracted and in doing so they paid the price.
Meanwhile, down in Walsh Park, Cork were back doing what they do best, flattering to deceive.
JUST like last year, all the talk had been how Pat Ryan’s young guns were set to take the hurling summer by storm and perhaps they believed their own hype.
There was no aggression, no sense that they had to impose themselves from the outset on Waterford and instead it felt like they were waiting for something to happen.
In the end, the only thing they were waiting for was to get beaten.
We kept hearing about the depth of their squad and how they had at least two players for every position, yet they started with Conor Lehane, Séamus Harnedy and Pat Horgan.
I am not here to retire that trio – on the contrary they have not only served their county well but they can also continue to do so.
There is great value to be extracted from experienced players in tight championship games, which is how Munster tends to roll. But to benefit from that wealth of experience those players need to be on the pitch at the end rather than at the start.
Especially given how the games are now almost week on week, Ryan has to be able to trust his younger players to take Cork deep enough into games to allow that trio come from the bench and close out matches.
Evidently that trust does not exist.
On that basis, expect a wounded Clare to leave Cork staring into the abyss by the time tomorrow evening comes.