ON A CLARE DAY YOU CAN HURL FOR MILES
Conor McGrath says Banner squad owe it to themselves to add to their 2013 All-Ireland success
‘I would like to win a Munster and an All-Ireland again. If you had said at the end of 2013 that you wouldn’t win a Munster title or another All Ireland in the next 10 years you couldn’t but call that a disappointment and a failure.’
CONOR McGRATH sits in a dressing room at Clare GAA’s Centre of Excellence in Caherlohan and ponders the twists in the road since that beguiling Saturday night in Croke Park when Cork and Clare served up a game for the ages. Perhaps it had something to do with the novel timing of an All-Ireland final replay, the floodlights coming on adding to the magic in the air as the goals and points rained down like no tomorrow — eight goals and 32 points in total.
If there was one score to sum up the breathless excitement, it came via the stick of the Clare corner-forward.
Delicately poised at Clare 3-13 Cork 2-22, the clock was just ticking into the 61st minute when a scramble for possession ensued on the Cork ’45. In raced McGrath as the ball broke into space. His first touch was sublime: a scoop of the sliotar to lift it over the challenge of Stephen White. Then, the burst of acceleration, as if he had flicked a hidden switch in his boots. Eating up the ground as he ran for the black spot before arrowing a shot into the top corner like it was one of those target competitions where there’s a prize on offer for such accuracy.
For the first time since, Clare and Cork meet in a Championship final with silverware at stake.
This Munster final is part of a summer that has reheated many of the same themes of 2013, of the twin hurling pillars of Kilkenny and Tipperary supposedly crumbling.
‘It was kinda similar to this year so far that the main teams, Kilkenny and Tipperary, were in the qualifiers early,’ says McGrath of Clare’s run in 2013.
‘We didn’t meet any of them. We just got on a roll. Got a good draw in that we met Laois first and the quality improved as we went along. The two matches against Cork were high-scoring thrilling matches that could have gone either way. Luckily we got a draw the first day.’
A day when Patrick Horgan’s snap strike over the bar had Jimmy Barry-Murphy and the Cork management team gathering together, waiting to celebrate the final whistle. ‘With 72 minutes gone he was the Hurler of the Year, winner of the All-Ireland for Cork. That’s how small the margins are.
‘You’d almost hope the ref would be playing for a draw. You’d be hopeful there would be another minute. He could easily have blown it up and that would have been it.’
Instead, Domhnall O’Donovan, a Clare corner-back, popped up to sling over the equaliser as if he had been doing it all his life.
‘Things rarely turn out as you plan on days like that. If there was a third match someone else might have been the hero.
‘The two matches Cork have played so far, they have been so attacking, great to watch. We would like to think we could play in a similar fashion. We haven’t shown that really since 2013.’
At the official medal presentation that winter, the man who guided Clare to the previous All-Irelands of 1995 and ’97, Ger Loughnane, told all those assembled that this bunch of players would have to do it all again to be regarded a great team.
McGrath is just as blunt in assessing the under-achievement of Clare since.
‘I don’t think anybody is calling Clare a great team. People at the time were suggesting after the 21 wins that there was the potential to do it but we’ve come nowhere near to doing it in the meantime. We certainly haven’t proven ourselves to be a great team since then.
‘That would be one of the main motivations. Three years have gone by without doing anything really. Every team has a motivation, whether it’s to do it for the first time, or in our case, to prove it wasn’t a flash in the pan.’
Just like 2013 when he was sidelined early in the season after surgery on a hip injury caused by wear-and-tear, he went under the knife late last October to fix a shoulder that kept popping out of its socket. An accountant with Deloitte in Limerick, he took the time in the closed season to go travelling for a month with his girlfriend to southeast Asia. The sweep and grandeur of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam is one memory of his time in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Teammate David McInerney had a similar idea. ‘We were in Vietnam at the same time but he was a couple of days behind me so we never actually met,’ he smiles. ‘He was flying down the country on a motorbike after me but never caught up with us.’
Plenty of other defenders know the same feeling.
Only recently, Loughnane decided to up the ante, describing Clare’s 2013 achievement as ‘the greatest fluke of all time’.
If it felt like a low blow, like a punch after the end-of-round bell, McGrath takes an unsentimental view of it all.
‘Based on what Clare have done in the last three years, you would have to revise… everybody has revised what people were saying at that stage, that Clare and Cork would go on and be very good.
‘Cork, in fairness, went on to win the Munster final the following year and have been back in an All-Ireland semi-final — we haven’t been anywhere near that. The record shows that we over-performed that year. We would like to think that we didn’t and that we can get back to those heights.
‘We were happy to beat Limerick but we’re all aware that it will take a couple of steps up the next day. Until we go and do what we did in 2013 again, you can’t argue with anyone who says it was a lucky win, or we didn’t meet Kilkenny or Tipperary.
‘It’s not that we didn’t train hard in
Three years have gone by without doing anything really
The record shows that Clare overperformed back in 2013
the meantime; we simply haven’t produced the results. We would like to think we’ve underperformed. Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe that’s the level we’re at.
‘Things have moved on from 2013. To be successful again, we need to be better again. We can only see if we’re right or if we weren’t as good as we thought we were as the years progress. After 2013 and 2014, you think that’s one year, we’ll be back next year.
‘Then the years slip by and slip by. 2013 gets further and further away. Every year gone is another year gone in your career.
‘Careers are getting shorter now — starting earlier and finishing earlier. I’m 26 this year, I couldn’t see myself playing for another five or six years. As the years go by, you recognise more that the years are slipping away. They do hurt a bit more.’
Being part of the success story of Cratloe, in both hurling and football, has only served to fuel his ambition.
Winning the Munster medal that has eluded any Clare hurler since 1998 would complete a set that includes last year’s National League, the county’s first since 1978.
Which brings him back to his opening statement. While he admits that he would deem the rest of his career a failure by not reaching the summit again, he qualifies it.
‘Even though I said it would be failure not win again, I am certainly grateful for the medal that we have.
‘It is not to say you don’t think you deserve the one you got, I think it is the fact we won it when you were so young, you kind of owe it to yourself to get back and do it again.’