The full house signs went up early in Semple for the 1999 Munster final. By the time they stopped counting, a close to palindromic crowd of 54,554 had paid through the stiles to see Cork dethrone Clare. It was one of those July days when Thurles had no choice but to surrender itself to hurling and traffic and noise and mess and was glad of every bit of it. Life, shimmering and popping everywhere you looked.
It’s impossible to overstate the hold Clare had on the Munster Championship at the time. Going into the final against Cork, they were on a run of one defeat in 11 matches stretching back over five seasons. And even that one loss only came about because Ciarán Carey scored one of the most famous points in GAA history to beat them at the death. They dictated the terms of every Munster campaign – you either flew at their altitude or you got the bus home.
So when Mark Landers got up on the podium to lift the Munster cup after a 1-15 to 0-14 victory, the Cork captain was well ready for a bit of mischief-making. Some of it was the giddiness of the moment – Cork had gone seven years without winning Munster, their longest fallow spell since the 1960s. But some of it too was the sense of a window being opened and some air finally let in on the Munster Championship.
“Could I have three cheers,” Landers shouted, a smile curling up from behind the mic, “for the former Munster champions – Clare!” The blanket of red covering the Semple grass down below him duly obliged, long and loud and free.
Even so, not one of them would have believed you then if you’d told them the future. You couldn’t have convinced anyone in Thurles that day – or anywhere else for that matter – that we would get to the year 2022 and Clare wouldn’t have added a single Munster title to the six they had. It just would not have computed that Landers’s little dig would still hold water a quarter of a century later.
The figures make brutal reading for anyone in Clare. Since their last title in 1998, every other strong Munster county has racked up at least four provincial crowns apiece. Cork and Tipperary have won more Munster titles since Clare’s last one than Clare have won in their whole history. Broaden it out and all eight of the other serious Liam MacCarthy counties have won at least one provincial title since Clare last did so. Every way you look at this, you lose.
“It’s abysmal,” says Colin Ryan, who played for Clare for 10 seasons in the middle of it all. Ryan is one of the handful of Clare players who stand out as the great anomalies of hurling history – All-Ireland winners who never so much as played in a provincial final, never mind won one.
“It’s been far, far too long,” he says.
How did it happen? Same way everything does, a little bit at a time. Frank Lohan was the last of the great ‘90s team to retire, enduring through until 2008. He was 24-years-old the day Cork beat them in Thurles. He didn’t know it then but he had already amassed 75 per cent of the Munster championship wins he would have in his career.
“It was always so competitive that if you weren’t at the level, you got found out quick,” Lohan says. “We were good in ‘99. That team had been on the go a long time, you had a good number of them who had been there since ‘93 or ‘94. We were at that point where we were even though we were able to put on a good performance, the next game would be a drop off.
“We were lucky to get a draw with Tipp and then had a brilliant performance in the replay. Then we lost to Cork, beat Galway after a replay but lost to Kilkenny in the end. We weren’t far off it maybe but we were always struggling to put two games back-to-back. That’s the sort of thing that happens when a team is starting to come to the end.”
And so it began. Year after year of shaping up for the starting blocks of a Munster campaign only to bow out long before medal ceremony time. Ger Loughnane’s last campaign was in 2000 and if that had never quite been said out loud then through a monstrous training regime the previous winter, the constant low-level ache in the players’ bodies told them all they needed to know about his intentions.
“We went all out to try and do something in Munster,” Lohan says. “We were absolutely … I’d say every player in the panel found themselves going into the championship a stone underweight. We got walloped by Tipperary and that was that. It wasn’t through lack of effort. It was the opposite if anything. We played a challenge match before it and Kilkenny absolutely ran through us. We faded away to nothing. We had no power left.”
Losing to Tipp in 2000 set in train a woeful precedent whereby Clare’s interest in Munster was invariably extinguished as soon as it began. In 18 campaigns between the start of the century and the dawn of the round-robin system, Clare lost their opening match of the Munster championship 14 times. Horizons were lowered year on year, expectations managed. By the mid to late 2000s, winning Munster titles was the stuff of folk memory. Trying to just win a match was the nitty-gritty.
“We went through a phase where we found winning the first round of the championship a really tough hurdle to get over,” says Colin Ryan. “That first game was nearly always the one [where] we fell down on. You weren’t really talking about winning Munster because you weren’t making it to Munster finals. There was one in 2008 and then none until 2017. And most of those years, we only had to win one game and we’d have been in the final.
“But we went through a long period where in all honesty we had a mental block for that first-round game in Munster. For whatever reason, we became a qualifier team. We went on runs through the qualifiers and we were nearly always able to get on a run in them. We always came up short in Munster though.”
Did it matter? It did and it didn’t. For plenty of those years, they were nowhere near good enough so there wasn’t a lot of pain in the pinch. The Loughnane years were always going to leave a bomb crater – on some level most people accepted that the first job was to haul themselves up and out of it. Clare had to go back to first principles and build from the bottom again.
“We never fully believed we were good enough to challenge in those years,” Ryan says. “Cork were strong, Tipp were coming through. Eoin Kelly was brilliant against us one year I remember. We were obsessed with that first game but when it came down to it, we weren’t good enough.”
Ryan bubbled up to the surface a few seasons before the great underage teams came through at the turn of the 2010s. He dislocated his shoulder against Cork in his first season but outside of his immediately family hardly anybody noticed – that was the day of the row coming out of the tunnel that went into Munster Championship as Semplegate. He missed most of the following year with it and couldn’t join the panel for the 2008 Munster final, Clare’s first since ‘99. Tipp wiped them that day and it was 2017 before they were back.
By then though, their world had changed. They were made men, All-Ireland champions, immortals. Sure, Waterford – and in those days Limerick – had gathered in Munster titles but they didn’t have Celtic Crosses to go with them. Clare were able to make a different determination, comfortable for once with their place in life.
“Munster wasn’t the be-all and end-all,” says Ryan. “I know winning Munster was a massive thing for Limerick in 2013 but at the end of the year, that season was probably a disappointment for them because we beat them in the All-Ireland semi-final. They would have felt that there was maybe an All-Ireland there for them.
“Once we won it, it was nearly as if the All-Ireland was really all we were interested in. Every year we set out, that was our big aim for the year. It’s only natural. You’re not going to get hung up on Munster after you’ve won an All-Ireland.”
Not that they didn’t try. Too hard at times, too cute at others. In 2014, Cork duffed them first time out. A year later against Limerick, it was the same story. Same again in 2016 against Waterford. Gone after one game each time, off in pursuit of bigger things.
“It was probably an annoyance after the success of 2013 that we didn’t push on and concentrate on the Munster Championship,” Ryan says. “But there was a lot of things that we overplayed after that. We tried to change too much too quickly. We got obsessed with trying to keep a step ahead of everyone and trying to do something different.
“Instead of trying to focus on the things we were good at and trying to get better at them, we were maybe trying to be too smart about things. And that was just the nature of the way Davy [Fitzgerald] was. He was a real deep thinker about how the game was played and wanting to stay one step ahead of everyone. But yeah, I think that was the time when we could have concentrated on getting a Munster Championship behind us and maybe making sure success was kept that way.”
The closest they came was in 2018. Cork had given them a five-point hiding in the previous year’s final but they had rebounded well and carried their form through the first Munster round-robin to lead by 2-11 to 0-9 just short of half-time. “Coasting,” as co-manager Gerry O’Connor put it afterwards.
But Luke Meade snaffled a goal before the break and Cork had overtaken them by the hour mark. That year ended with them missing the All-Ireland final by the width of a post. Nobody took too much notice of the Munster final when they held up the X-ray to the light.
Ultimately, they might not this year either. That’s just the nature of things now. But for this week at least, there’s an unmistakable buzz in Clare for this final. There’s an electricity about the fixture itself and a visceral love around the county for Brian Lohan’s team.
“They give it their all,” says the manager’s brother Frank. “Everyone can see that. They work hard and people have really bought into them. If they were to get success, we’d jump at it. The All-Ireland is the big thing obviously but it would be nice to win something.”
Twenty-four years is too long to be former Munster champions. It has to end sometime.
Why not now?
Munster championship records since Clare’s last title in 1998
Clare
Played 42
Won 15
Lost 25
Drew 2
Lost first game 16
Munster titles 0
Cork
Played 52
Won 30
Lost 18
Drew 4
Lost first game 11
Munster titles 8
Waterford
Played 50
Won 18
Lost 27
Drew 5
Lost first game 10
Munster titles 4
Tipperary
Played 58
Won 33
Lost 20
Drew 5
Lost first game 9
Munster titles 7
Limerick
Played 46
Won 19
Lost 21
Drew 6
Lost first game 12
Munster titles 4
