Darran looking for a different kind of deja vu in Croke Park

Clare manager Colm Collins says that the Banner’s first championship appearance in Croke Park in 24 years will be an occasion to savour. Joe Ó Muircheartaigh reports

TO put the scale of Clare’s achievements this season in context it’s worth referencing the two occasions that the county has played senior football championship in Croke Park. 1992 was the last and before that again you have to track back 75 years to 1917.

In 1917 Clare played five championship games over the space of five months. Three in Munster with wins over Waterford, Tipperary and Cork (Kerry didn’t enter a team that year) and then the All-Ireland semi-final against Galway and final where they were beaten by Wexford.

In ’92 there were just three games, Tipperary and Kerry in Munster and then Dublin in the All-Ireland semi-final. This year, however, with Sunday comes the landmark achievement of playing six championship games in the one season and the fourth successive weekend that they’ll be seeing competitive action in a flurry of games never experienced by Clare footballers before.

For manager Colm Collins it means one thing – the momentum of games and more games that he hopes and believes can carry his rejuvenated side to their best display of the year in the county’s biggest football day out since that All-Ireland semi-final 24 years ago.

“Any team that has ambitions will have improved and we know Kerry will have since we met in Munster,” says Collins, “but we’d like to think we’ve improved a good bit as well. We’ve got the three wins on the trot now and you can’t beat that kind of momentum and confidence that there is in the group and they’re all really looking forward to it.

“It’s a serious challenge but opportunities like this don’t come around every day and we’ve got to grasp it with both hands. It’s a massive chance to be playing at this level land we will be doing our utmost and will be having a cut,” he adds.

Clare’s preparations for this latest test against Kerry and trying to overturn the twelve-point gap that was between the sides in their Munster semi-final joust on 12 June last began in the hours after last Saturday’s landmark win over Roscommon.

They took to the sea at Salthill and did so again the following day when they were back in Clare, while there’s been minimal training between games over the past four weeks as they’ve gone from game to game and met the individual challenges posed the by different opposition along the way.

“There are certain places you have to go to develop as a team,” says Collins of the team’s progress. “You hit targets as you go along. Promotion from Division 3, winning Division 3, getting to the last 12.

“Once you reach targets your expectations go up and the next thing for us was to beat a Division 1 team. It was an important thing to do and we’ve done that. Now we have another big target this Sunday.

“The dominance that Kerry and Cork have had in Munster – if we’re going anywhere we’ve got to challenge that now and what a better place to challenge it than Sunday in Croke Park,” he adds.

A challenge that’s referenced by the back story of that Munster semi-final meeting when the disastrous concession of two goals inside the first five minutes sucked the competitive life out of the game straight away and resulted in Kerry winning in a canter.

“We felt that we let ourselves down in Killarney in the sense that we gave them a seven-point lead and then tried to play them,” says Collins. “What’s vital the next day is that we start and don’t concede early scores like the last day. “We have to start strong — that’s vital, we just have to do that and stay in the game as long as we can and then see where that takes us. We have got to be totally clued in from the very start and to go after it and give the performance of our lives. This group of players are really up for it and I think they will give that perfor

mance.”