It’s a process but when it works out, vindication follows. Brian Lohan is in his fifth year managing Clare. For the past two seasons, his team had been regarded as Limerick’s great adversaries in Munster, last year handing them a first defeat in four championships.
Kilkenny had provided demoralising postscripts to both years, bouncing out of Leinster to debunk these Munster notions in the All-Ireland semi-finals. For Clare it was like battling through jungle and mountain terrain to get to the open road only to be knocked down by the first passing car.
On Saturday, Lohan is taking questions in the context of having successfully motored into a first All-Ireland final in 11 years and emphasising the incremental approach.
“We try and play it, play by play, moment by moment and try to get better each day, each half or period of a game we play. We feel we’re a good team. We know that Kilkenny are a good team but we came up thinking we’re better.
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“There was that pressure – to lose three in a row up here, on the back of three in a row in Munster – but sometimes you just get fed up and it has to stop some time. Things turn around when you work hard and our lads work hard.
It was a strange match. Kilkenny looked well on course to prolong Clare’s semi-final misery after a first half, slightly misrepresented by the slenderness of the five-point margin.
“Yeah, I suppose in the first-half we were very frustrated,” said Lohan. “We had put down two really good weeks of training and had good planning and we felt we had a good idea of what we wanted to do but just didn’t do it. Typical Kilkenny, you come up with great ideas and you’re just not able to do it. They kind of blew us out of it around the middle of the field, that middle eight. They had huge space.
“We probably weren’t punished as badly as we could have been punished in that first half.”
As usual, goals underwrote Kilkenny’s prospects. A great piece of improvisation from Eoin Cody put the Leinster champions in control of the scoreboard in the 24th minute but they failed to extend the five-point lead by half-time.
It proved an inadequate buffer against the Clare rebound.
Having started the second half so well, reducing the margin to a score and threatening a far more intense contest, Clare went back to well scripted foibles.
Eibhear Quilligan’s saves had kept them in it in the first half but he mishandled a long-range free and Billy Ryan netted the gift. Clare though were playing on different settings by now and reeled off six points to Kilkenny’s two in the following 10 minutes.
Lohan spoke about how he had given the players a week off after the third successive Munster final defeat by Limerick and how he believed this had freshened them up.
“It also meant that if we did get over the quarter-final we were in good shape and we had been able to reset and since that game against Wexford it seems like our year has just started.
“There was great energy in training, really good energy in training for the last two weeks. Our players have a brilliant attitude and a great bunch to be around. very good atmosphere inside the camp for the last couple of weeks.”
His Kilkenny counterpart Derek Lyng, who took the team seamlessly to the All-Ireland final in last year’s first season of the post-Cody era, was disappointed in how his team was ultimately so comprehensively outgunned.
“We were in a strong position when we got the second goal. We didn’t kick on when we should have. We tried making a few changes to get a spark back into us but the momentum was with Clare. The reality of it is that they won all the battles. That was my feeling on it.”
He was asked about Adrian Mullen’s fitness. The Man of the Match from the Leinster final had been wrapped in clingfilm by David McInerney.
“Adrian was fine. Adrian has been training over the last week. He had a bit of tightness for a week but nothing major.”
His team hadn’t scored for the final 15 minutes and by the end, were reduced to hopeful lobs into the square to try to rescue the situation.
“Yeah, we probably had a couple of chances that we didn’t take. But that’s also down to the pressure that Clare were putting on us.”
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