BANNER IN THE WORKS
Tactical misdirection and lost hunger are why Clare didn’t push on after 2013, says medal winner Ryan
WHEN supporters spilled out onto Jones Road that September evening, struggling to catch their breath, they reckoned they had seen the future. They had been transfixed over two extraordinary matches as two teams scored 11 goals and 73 points between them. This was the future. It was about youth. It was about pace. And it was mostly about Clare.
Four and half years on from that epic 2013 All-Ireland final, Clare and Cork clash in Cusack Park today, with a remarkable statistic that the only Banner players who have lined out at headquarters since are those from Ballyea, who lost a club final last year.
The rising side that was supposed to dominate the hurling landscape never materialised. It’s difficult to understand why Clare haven’t been a force in the Championship since winning the Liam MacCarthy cup in 2013. Five of the players who featured in the replay win over Cork were All-Ireland Under 21 champions the following year. Eleven of the players had won an All-Ireland U21 medal in one of the previous three years.
This was a golden generation that had already lived up to expectations. Unlike Limerick in the early noughties, they had used three All-Ireland U21 titles as a springboard to fire them to the summit of the game. The age profile of that Clare team was staggering. The oldest player on the pitch in the All-Ireland final was 28, while the average age of the team was just 23.
However, more than four years later, we are still waiting for a second act. It has led former Clare boss Ger Loughnane to label the team ‘a boyband who were a onehit wonder’.
Things have changed in the interim. Davy Fitzgerald’s repeated attempts to get another tune out of the players came to an abrupt end in 2016 and the side Donal Maloney and Gerry O’Connor are moulding doesn’t resemble that title-winning side a whole lot. Six of the players who started the drawn final of 2013 have retired. A number of those on the bench that day have also moved on.
Colin Ryan is one of those who have left the inter-county scene. He took a year out last year, to play a bit of soccer for Clare in the Oscar Traynor Cup. He and his wife Louise had their first child during the hiatus, too. And when the call came to see if he wanted to resume his Clare career last October, he just felt it wasn’t for him.
Ryan is enjoying the experience of calling himself a Banner supporter again. He went to the opening League game with his father, the first time they went to a Clare match together since he was a teenager. And it is giving him a fresh perspective on why Clare never kicked on and dominated as many thought they would leaving Croke Park that September night. ‘It is a strange one and something you would think about,’ Ryan says of Clare’s failure to build on the 2013 success. ‘It was not for want of trying. If anything, we trained even harder in 2014 and 2015 than we did in 2013. And maybe we actually tried too hard, maybe we felt that we needed to go too hard at it to get the same appetite and drive back again. ‘Maybe we should have taken a step back and looked at what worked for us in 2013 and focused on that. But we were working on our weaknesses, or our perceived weaknesses, rather than just concentrating on our strengths. ‘Everything was so raw in 2013. We have never been at that stage before, we were hungry to win the All-Ireland. In the following year, maybe the appetite wasn’t there.’
However, Ryan pinpoints the replay defeat to Wexford the following summer as a turning point. The Slaneysiders ended their All-Ireland reign on a dramatic night in Wexford Park. ‘I often think of that game. If we had got over Wexford, I think that summer might have opened up for us again. That defeat did knock us back, and it knocked a bit of confidence out of the team, because we felt that we should be beating Wexford. If we had managed to win that replay, things might have been different.’
As someone in the middle of all the madness, Ryan felt the idea of Clare dominating the landscape was over-blown. ‘I think we were a new team and neutrals were quite excited by the manner in which we won it, so they wanted to believe that we could dominate.
‘There’s no doubt that we changed the landscape, but other teams were building and coming up, the likes of Waterford and Galway. Intelligent coaches would have looked at the way that we won in 2013, played to our strengths, and decided to do the same thing for their team.’
Clare underwent a gruelling training schedule in the years that followed the All-Ireland success, to try to re-discover the winning formula. But the sparkle was missing. And while the rate of attrition from the 2013 team does seem remarkable, Ryan says each has their own reason for leaving.
‘Paddy [Donnellan] has two kids and Brendan [Bugler] just had a kid. Domhnall O’Donovan was always very career-orientated, Darach [Honan] has injury problems and Conor [Ryan] has health issues. So, there is a reason for each of them not to be there.’
It wasn’t down to frustration that they were unable to build on 2013, in other words. ‘We all have some great memories of playing with Clare. Of course, 2013 will stand out and we will always have it,’ Ryan says.
He will go along to Cusack Park with his father this afternoon and there might be a supporter or two that will ask him questions of why Clare have seemed stuck in a rut in the past few years — the 2016 League title aside.
The golden generation are still there. The likes of Tony Kelly, whose genius was recognised by his claiming of both Player of the Year and Young Player of the Year at just 19. Podge Collins and Conor McGrath, Colm Galvin and Shane O’Donnell, the hat-trick hero of that replay.
But the years are catching up on them. This September, it will be five years when we thought we saw a glimpse of a brave new world in the way that Clare played. In that half a decade teams such as Galway and Waterford saw what was possible with Clare and out-stripped them in the pecking order.
Of course, they will always have that magical September evening when they enthralled a nation. But there is a feeling that they could have had so much more.