Pain of losing drives Banner
AREFLECTION of the human fireball that guides them, Clare hurlers have now r eached t he point where they are allergic to defeat.
The sense of genuine satisfaction that was impossible to ignore in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s win over Tipperary could have been put down to its timing at the end of an uncomfortable week for Clare hurling.
But those allegations by Davy Fitzgerald which claimed that the county team had been infected by a feckless culture in the recent past hardly tainted this group — after all, it is their single-minded attitude and application that will fuel the defence of their All-Ireland crown later this summer.
Rather than putting distance between themselves and some loose talk, Clare’s Conor Ryan was adamant that their four-goal mauling of the Premier men was down to the ‘hurt’ of losing two weeks previously to Dublin.
‘We were hurting. We were really hurting for the few days after the Dublin game. We knew we didn’t do
“We want to be a team that is hurt to the core by every defeat”
ourselves justice and that wasn’t the Clare team that we know we can be. We did leave ourselves down,’ insisted Ryan.
There was a time when teams dined out for entire springs on the back of an All-Ireland-winning campaign and while that culture no longer survives it is still rare for champions to feel such an urgent need to purge a single result that had no more than a brace of League points hanging off it.
Perhaps Clare looked upwards at Kilkenny with five League and Championship doubles under Cody (below) and realised that truly great teams don’t do ‘down time’. Or maybe they cast their eyes on Tipperary and noted that their decline after the succes of 2010 was immediate — they won just three of their seven League games that spring — and, to this point, irreversible.
More likely, though, Clare looked at a manager in Fitzgerald who loathes losing and decided that the value of becoming champions was devalued if they did not seek to live up to it at every turn by dropping their standards.
‘ We’re All -Ireland champions now and people are trying to knock us back a peg or two and we just have to be waiting for them and expecting that,’ remarked Ryan.
‘We’re a team now that losing does hurt us and I suppose that’s down to the character of the man that’s over us. ‘Losing isn’t something we think about in this team and we want to be a team that every loss, no matter whether it’s League, Waterford Crystal or anything, hurts us to the very core. ‘We’re trying to maintain a consistent level of performance and the one thing we don’t want to do is drop it. ‘What we did against Kilkenny (in the opening round), we had a good performance and then we completely dropped it against Dublin. It was n’ t that we became bad hurlers overnight; it was probably just that we didn’t have the same focus.
‘We know when we’re a focused, ruthless team we’re a different animal and we showed that against Tipperary,’ he added.
With four points from three games, four teams out of six qualifying for the play-offs and two home games against Waterford and Galway to come, little wonder that the market noted their declaration of intent by marking them as 9/4 second favourites yesterday behind Kilkenny (15/8) to win it out.
Not reaching the quarter-finals would hardly be a disaster given that last year the best the spring could offer them was a relegation play-off win over Cork, but this time their sights have been set significantly higher and it’s clear that half meas- ures will not be tolerated.
‘We won’t be compensating, we won’t be saying we need a point here, we’ll just be going out in every game to try and do the best we can and hopefully get as many points out of the last two games and you never know, maybe there’s a League semi-final place for us.
‘We certainly don’t want to be where we were last year, down in the relegation zone so we’ll drive on from here,’ continued the Cratloe man
‘We’re winners at the end of the day and losing does hurt us and we were hurt against Dublin. We just said we didn’t want to feel like that again this year.
‘We’re not saying we’re going to win every single game from here on in but we’re going to go out and try and put in performances.’