Former Ballyea manager Robbie Hogan probably speaks for most of Clare when recalling the county’s magical twilight All-Ireland after the 2013 replay.
“I remember that Saturday evening with the wife and the kids in Croke Park after the replay against Cork. We were all saying, ‘we’ll see a lot more of these days’. That was 11 years ago and we haven’t been back since.”
The Clare match-day panel for this weekend’s renewal of rivalries with Cork features a good few of the players who left the pitch that evening as All-Ireland champions for the first time.
In the years since, ‘for the first time’ painfully acquired a bruising suffix to read, ‘for the first and only time’. Until now, there has been no return to the final, no shot at writing Paradise Regained.
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Nobody will have felt the failure more acutely that Tony Kelly, the embodiment of that Clare team, young, just 19, and outrageously gifted. He was so good that season that a cascade of recognition fell his way: All-Irelands at senior and under-21, All Star, Hurler of the Year, Young Hurler of the Year.
Fast forward to two weeks ago and, after a wretched year of injury and surgery, Kelly, now 30 and captaining the team, overcomes the anonymity of a poor first half by the team to finish strongly enough to beat – finally – Kilkenny, to whom they had lost the two previous All-Ireland semi-finals.
He shot two late points to fill out the difference between the teams. At last, he and fellow 2013 survivors, David McInerney, John Conlon and Shane O’Donnell will line out in another final.
It hasn’t been easy for Kelly. In the past couple of years, he has broken both ankles and struggled for form, coming on against Limerick in the first championship match but not reappearing until the Munster final.
James O’Connor fulfilled the Kelly role in the 1990s, will o’ the wisp wing forward and often identified as the player to stop if you wanted to derail Clare in two All-Ireland-winning years.
He and Kelly – along with county selector Brendan Bugler and another Ballyea hurler Jack Brown – are all on the staff at St Flannan’s, the famed hurling nursery in Ennis. O’Connor believes that Kelly’s career needed the late restatement.
“If Tony hadn’t bookended his career the way he has, he would have felt unfulfilled. We went through fallow years when he would click into action and score three points in quick succession but you could have 30 minutes of the ball passing him by.
“Whatever buttons [Clare manager] Brian Lohan is pressing since he came in are working. During Covid he got himself into incredible physical shape and had three years when he was a phenomenon, Roy of the Rovers stuff. Very few players in the game could do that under such pressure and on such a consistent basis.
“This year with Shane O’Donnell going so well and others stepping up, there’s maybe less pressure on him. That’s why winning the league and the Cork match were so important for the team – to win a national title and to beat Cork in Pairc Uí Chaoimh in a must-win game without your most famous player – and reduces the pressure on him.”
It would be gross misrepresentation to describe what did – or even didn’t happen – between 2013 and 2020 as wilderness years.
After all he won a further All-Ireland under-21 and a national league medal before winning a Munster club with Ballyea, a first Fitzgibbon with UL and reaching the All-Ireland club final in 2017 as well as coming within a whisker of getting back to an All-Ireland final in 2018, losing to Galway after a replay.
Former Tipperary All-Ireland winner Colm Bonnar coached Waterford IT in the 2015 final and remembers a sense of the expectations surrounding Kelly as he salvaged extra time for UL at the end of the hour.
“It was a dogged affair in terrible weather, typical Fitzgibbon – rain and win. He stood over it and it was no easy free, 75 or 80 metres out and I was thinking, no way is he putting this over. Next thing, bang! Over the bar and it showed a player stepping up in desperate conditions.
“He turned to one of the Waterford lads and said kind of to himself, ‘thank f*** that went over’.”
That the expectations of a decade ago have revived is a consequence of the standards Kelly established again when former Clare All-Ireland winner Brian Lohan took over.
“One game comes to mind,” according to former club manager Hogan, “back in the Covid [2020], behind closed doors against Limerick. He scored 0-17 (eight from play, equalling the championship record) against the best side in the country. Even though the team weren’t achieving what they wanted, he was performing to a phenomenal level.”
The epic Munster final with Limerick in 2022 toppled into extra time because Kelly converted a sideline, again high-pressure and from an acute angle.
“At the end of training, we used often have to turn off the lights and leave him on the pitch to practise line balls,” recalls Hogan. “It wasn’t a fluke that that went over the bar. At the end of hard sessions, he’d still stick around to practise and find time to take those line balls.
“That day, his first reaction was to look for a team-mate, someone to give it to. You could see no-one was offering themselves so he had to have a go at it himself.”
In the conversation for Hurler of the Year for three seasons despite his county not being in an All-Ireland final, he was essentially carrying Clare.
That has modified this year but he will feel the pressure at this stage of his career back on the big stage.
“The great players always have that burden of expectation from a relatively young age,” according to James O’Connor. “The second one is always sweeter. You’re older and know what it takes.”
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