Clare as champions - lose to Tipp and they'll be on brink of unwanted hat-trick

Irish Daily Mirror

10-05-2025

Jimmy Barry-Murphy knew before a ball was pucked that Cork were up against it.
It was the Munster semi-final of 1998 and his side, fresh from winning the League, were All-Ireland champions Clare's first opponents.
En route to that League title, Cork scored an 11-point win over Clare in the semi-final, with rumours that Ger Loughnane had effectively thrown the game by training his players hard the day before ultimately going unfounded.
That Clare team didn't have a cruising gear; it was all or nothing. Having not been fully wound up for that League semi-final, they were exposed by Cork, but it left them with a cause ahead of the Championship and they trained maniacally for that opening game.
At the end of the tunnel in Semple Stadium at the time, there was a rope that players were required to go around when running onto the pitch. As Clare captain Anthony Daly led his side out, Cork selector Tom Cashman was in his eyeline and he roared 'get out of my way' at him. The 15 of them then jumped clean over the rope and out onto the field.
'We're in trouble here,' Barry-Murphy said to Dr Con Murphy.
He was right. Clare had too much for Cork and pulled away to win well by eight points, a 19-point turnaround from their previous meeting only weeks before.
And it remains the only time in living memory that Clare served up a performance commensurate with their status as Liam MacCarthy Cup holders. They started the defence of their first All-Ireland, won in 1914, with a landslide win over Waterford the following year but didn't get out of Munster.
In 1996, they were gone after one game, albeit a classic that Daly dubbed the 'most memorable match I ever played' as they lost to Limerick and Ciaran Carey's sensational late winner.
After winning a first All-Ireland in 81 years, it was inevitable that the celebrations would spill over, something particularly common to counties outside of the 'big three', and Clare's preparations suffered in '96.
In retrospect, it was felt that they tried to play catch-up on their training too late in the year ahead of that Limerick game and paid for it coming down the stretch as they were reeled in on a scorching day.
They struck a better balance in 1998 but things started to unravel after the Cork win. Against opposition that they weren't unduly hung up with, they were vulnerable to Waterford in the Munster final and could only draw.
But Loughnane was incensed at how he perceived his players had allowed themselves to be bullied by their opponents and turned it up to 11 ahead of the replay. Colin Lynch swung wildly and often at the throw-in and the game was played in an ill spirit, with Brian Lohan and Michael White sent off and others fortunate not to follow them.
Clare won well but Lohan would be suspended and the Munster Council sanctioned Lynch in retrospect, giving him a three-month ban two nights before the All-Ireland semi-final against Offaly, for which Loughnane would not be allowed on the sideline.
The manager had already gone after the Munster Council in an extraordinary address on local radio and railed against what he insisted was a great injustice on Lynch.
They just about got away with a draw against Offaly but were winning the replay well until their opponents whittled an 11-point deficit down to three, at which point referee Jimmy Cooney mistakenly blew the match up two minutes before full-time. A refixture was ordered and Offaly prevailed.
'It's the one that got away, there's no question about it,' said Jamesie O'Connor in Denis Walsh's seminal book, Hurling: The Revolution Years. 'Coming off the field after losing the third game to Offaly was probably one of the all-time lows.
'The whole year was a bit of a circus. I remember at the end of it thinking that it was nice just to go back to leading a semi-normal life in the sense that it just seemed to be one controversy after another.'
Publicly at least, Loughnane has always stood by his actions that year but defender Michael O'Halloran wondered if he harboured regrets privately.
'Loughnane was too powerful and you'd nobody really strong enough on the county board or anywhere else to say anything, to just rein him in and say, 'Leave it',' said O'Halloran. 'It didn't happen, and maybe it should have happened.'
It was another generation before Clare entered the Championship as All-Ireland winners and, in 2014, they made the sharpest exit for champions since their predecessors in 1996 and the earliest in the post-knockout era.
Davy Fitzgerald, Clare manager at the time, always felt that backing up the previous year, when a young side had come from nowhere to win the All-Ireland in some style, would be challenging and, again, the demands on players over the subsequent winter overlapped with the new year.
'There was just this seemingly endless flow of requests and, though I pretty much put a stop to any unnecessary functions, there was always a house call of one sort or another that, in conscience, we couldn't turn down,' he wrote in his last autobiography.
He outlined how he admonished his players after a thumping from Tipperary in the Waterford Crystal Cup, feeling they had given in, and while they lifted it to beat Kilkenny in the League opener the following week, he felt it took a lot of out of them and their form was up and down for the rest of the year.
Then there was conflict with clubs, who wished for club championship games to be played while the inter-county season was in train, with Fitzgerald resenting them not consulting his father, county secretary Pat, on the matter. He wrote of a 'realisation hitting home that a fair raft of people in Co Clare didn't give a fiddler's about how we got on in our All-Ireland defence', adding that 'it felt as if they were pulling against us, almost willing us to fail'.
Podge Collins, outstanding in 2013, decided to combine both codes at the highest level with his father having taken over the footballers. Cork knocked them out in Munster and an unheralded Wexford side took them to a replay in the qualifiers on a day when Collins was sent off.
They suffered two more red cards in the replay but only lost after extra time.
There has been no great noise or off-field controversy this year in Clare by comparison with previous All-Ireland defences, but they were relegated in the League, a first for All-Ireland champions since 1993, while injuries have hurt them.
They are winless after two games and were without Tony Kelly, Conor Cleary, Shane O'Donnell and Diarmuid Ryan in the defeat against Waterford, though they shouldn't be as threadbare this evening against Tipperary.
But lose again and they'll be as good as out of the Championship. No reigning champion has failed to get out of the Munster or Leinster group under the round robin system.
Since 1989, only twice have the champions exited at the earliest juncture; Clare in 1996 in the knockout era and in 2014 in the qualifier era.
Right now, they're in danger of completing the set in the round robin era.
CLARE AS ALL-IRELAND CHAMPIONS
1915 Munster semi-final: Clare 10-4 Waterford 2-1.
1915 Munster final: Cork 8-2 Clare 2-1.
1996 Munster semi-final: Limerick 1-13 Clare 0-15.
1998 Munster semi-final: Clare 0-21 Cork 0-13.
1998 Munster final: Clare 1-16 Waterford 3-10. Replay: Clare 2-16 Waterford 0-10.
1998 All-Ireland semi-final: Clare 1-13 Offaly 1-13. Replay: Clare 1-16 Offaly 2-10 (game unfinished). Refixture: Offaly 0-16 Clare 0-13.
2014 Munster semi-final: Cork 2-23 Clare 2-18.
2014 All-Ireland qualifier, round 1: Clare 2-25 Wexford 2-25 (AET). Replay: Wexford 2-25 Clare 2-22 (AET).
2025 Munster SHC round 1: Clare 3-21 Cork 2-24.
2025 Munster SHC round 2: Waterford 2-23 Clare 0-21.
Played 13*, won 3, drawn 4, lost 6.