NAILING DOWN A STARTING PLACE WITH THE BANNER IS PETER DUGGAN’S NO 1 PRIORITY
The standout star of the Super 11s series, Peter Duggan is keen to nail down his place with Banner ahead of the Championship
FOR one Sunday afternoon in November, Peter Duggan became a minor online sensation. Anyone tuning in to TG4 for the slightly surreal experience of watching a hurling double bill being played in the hallowed baseball surrounds of Fenway Park in Boston, couldn’t fail to notice the rangy Clare forward tearing it up.
By the end of an 11-a-side, goals only competition, the crowd of nearly 28,000 were close to chanting his name.
Five times he found the net in the first match against Tipperary. In the final against Galway, he blitzed the All-Ireland champions for seven goals, the pick of them coming when he showcased a velvet glove to go with the iron hand of his physical frame, shrugging off the considerable attentions of two Galway hurlers to bat the ball one-handed to the net.
‘I guess this makes us World Super 11s champions, of the world. Peter Duggan MVP,’ gushed one Clare supporter’s account on Twitter. Fans favourite Buff Egan tipped his hat to him and the untold damage he did up front. One follow-up article online was even entitled: ‘Peter Duggan is the man to save Clare hurling’. Right, no pressure then. Little wonder then that he admits he had a ball on the trip, in what was the first shot fired in Clare’s new season that sees them face Limerick in the final of the Munster Hurling League this Sunday at the Gaelic Grounds.
‘Everything worked out for me,’ he says, though his insistence that ‘it was more luck than anything else,’ doesn’t exactly tally with scoring 52 of Clare’s 100 points over the two-game series.
‘After the first few went in, I got a bit more confidence, was trying more ambitious shots. They did come off. I don’t know why but it did suit the bigger guy a little bit more. I would have thought that it would suit the smaller, nippier guy.’
The Boston Red Sox top at the airport in Shannon on the way out was the giveaway in terms of his interest in American sport. Towering over two Aer Lingus cabin crew members for a photoshoot, the 6’3” attacker looked like he couldn’t wait to get out there.
‘I’d be a bit of a fan of baseball. Everyone in Ireland nearly knows about Fenway Park. It must be the most famous stadium in America. Playing there made up my mind that I had to be on the trip.’
It’s a quirk of fate that but for his club Clooney-Quin’s county final replay defeat, Ryan Taylor and himself would have been staying at home to prepare for a Munster club championship game.
Instead, he found himself landing and pitching baseball at Boston College in a meet-and-greet cum training session. Like a scene from Jackie Tyrrell’s appearance on The Toughest Trade, they shocked the locals by foregoing the catching glove in baseball. ‘They had that mantra of thinking we were nuts. We were all going up catching the ball without any gloves. They were thinking, “What are these guys doing at all?” It wasn’t even sore on the hands. Fair enough, if someone leathered one head high straight at you it might be a different story but a high ball, you’d catch it away no problem.’ Hurlers, huh? He sees a future in a game modified for an American audience and the smaller pitch environs in the States. ‘For the American public, it had to be designed like that. Easy to understand. All about goals. When the ball went into the net, that was a score. If you brought in the concept of points, they might get lost.
‘I’d have a few relatives in America, living in Arizona. Brought all their kids along to this one. They said they are going to make their way to New York during the summer to watch some of the big games. I’d say definitely it would work for the foreseeable future.’
That Duggan has been around since the signature 2013 AllIreland triumph under Davy Fitzgerald when he was just 20, yet has struggled to break into the starting 15, is down largely to the cast of first-team characters: Hurler and Young Hurler of the Year Tony Kelly, All-Star magician Podge Collins, then teenage sensation Shane O’Donnell. Add Conor McGrath, John Conlon, Colin Ryan to the mix and you can see why it has been so hard to gain a start up front, despite his ballwinning credentials and pedigree of being part of three successive All-Ireland Under 21 titles. Yet Clare’s Achilles heel last summer was arguably a consistent primary ballwinner in the half-forward line − the repeated short option in a puck-out strategy backfiring in the Munster final against Cork and All-Ireland quarter-final against Tipperary. ‘It depends on match to match. When you see in training, some of our smaller guys are outrageous under high balls. You have to see what’s happening inside,’ says Duggan. ‘If you had seen Shane O’Donnell last year in training – he was one of the slickest hurlers I’ve ever seen in terms of what he was doing. We had numerous players doing outrageous things in training but it just didn’t work out for us on the day.
‘People don’t realise from outside, but the panel of players we have is quite outrageous. Myself, Cathal Malone, Niall Deasy, John Conlon, we’d all be considered similar – big, strong men, high ball ability. For every position it just comes down to whoever is in form,’ he continues. ‘Not that I haven’t had my head down before but if I stay going the way I am, we’ll see what happens.’
He is as nonplussed as anyone else as to why the Clare squad hasn’t kicked on since 2013, such a poor track record in Munster part of the reason why they parted company with Davy Fitzgerald.
Joint managers Donal Moloney and Gerry O’Connor guided the senior team to a first Munster final appearance since 2008 last summer.
‘It’s an odd one,’ admits Duggan. ‘Munster championship is extremely hard. All the teams are as tough as each other. We couldn’t say we haven’t prepared well because we have. We always thought we were in the right frame of mind, the right fitness. It just hasn’t worked out.’
In the third year of his studies at Limerick IT, he still has Davy as manager for the upcoming Fitzgibbon Cup. He’s not surprised to see him making waves with Wexford after moving on. ‘Typical Davy. You know what you’re going to get off him. No matter where he goes, he’s going to get you firing.’
He is ‘intrigued’ by the prospect of this year’s round-robin Munster championship and disputes the view that it will dilute the National League, pointing to the significance of Clare’s title win in 2016, a first since 1978.
‘Considering this year’s Championship has changed, people have this idea that this year’s League won’t be as competitive. Any hurling man knows for a fact, no matter
what way Championship is, a League is still a huge thing to win. If you get your hands on a League medal… when we won the year before last we loved it. It’s a national medal. If anyone asks have you won an All-Ireland medal, well this is an all-Ireland medal.
‘It was so long since we won the League previously, it was huge. League isn’t as importance as Championship but when you haven’t won something in a long time, you could sense the significance.
‘Same if Clare win a Munster final. I think it will be as big, if not bigger than 2013. A Munster in Clare is humongous.’
Conor McGrath spoke openly last summer of Clare’s failure to kick-on this past four years and Duggan too says it is about delivering on that promise.
‘We haven’t shown it in four years. If you see a 16-year-old coming up along and think he’s a fantastic hurler and you think he has great potential, if he reaches the age of 22 and he’s not doing much, where is his potential then?’
He says 2013 ‘seems like a world away now’, and gives off the clear sense that the here and now is all that matters. In the Munster Hurling League against Cork last weekend, he was at it again, rattling in another couple of goals. Afterwards, Gerry O’Connor talked about the year ahead for Duggan and Clare: ‘He didn’t start too many games for us last year and he is finding form. He was enjoying himself out there. But this time of year, I know it was a very open game so a lot of guys showed very well. There will be much tougher challenges ahead.’
At Fenway Park, one of Frances Fitzgerald’s last acts as Tánaiste was to present Clare captain Patrick O’Connor with the Super 11s trophy. Her political fate was a lesson in how quickly the ground underneath can shift.
As O’Connor succinctly put it, the tougher challenges lie ahead.