In this edited extract from Richard Fitzpatrick's upcoming book, Where Clare Leads, Ireland Follows,Anthony Daly, Michael 'Babs' Keating and others give their opinions on former Clare boss Ger Loughnane

AFTER A six-year hiatus, Ger Loughnane stepped back into inter-county management in September, 2006 with a different tribe, being unveiled as the Galway hurlers' manager, brashly proclaiming that if he didn't deliver an All-Ireland title in two years he'd be a "failure".

Boy, did he fail.

As misadventures go, it ranks with Cloughie's 44-day reign at Leeds United. Both seasons Galway didn't even manage to get past the quarter-final stages, losing - in a particularly listless performance - to 14-man Cork in the qualifiers in July.

Having been removed as manager of Galway - his three-year term cut short by a year - who knows what lies in store for Loughnane?

It's hard to imagine the hurling landscape without his irreverent presence, even the muzzled version on display last season.

In Clare, because of the controversies he has created, the enmities he has aroused in the hurling community, there is an eaten-bread-is-soon-forgotten feeling about his legacy. As his good friend, Colum Flynn remarks wistfully: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

Though no Caesar and certainly not godly, to paraphrase American writer, Padgett Powell, Loughnane is still a kind of god in the county. Like all gods, he's loved by some (mostly from a distance) and not by others.

"I still have desperate respect for the guy (Loughnane) for what he did for us, but relations at the moment are nothing short - and I've no problem in saying this - of sad," says Anthony Daly. "Things are sad, and if I've contributed to that. . . I'm not so sure I have.

"I did nothing as far as I'm concerned and even last year - my first year - on the auld panel ( The Sunday Game), there was a lot of controversy, and I tried to stay clear of it as much as I could and yet every time Tony (Considine, 2007 Clare hurling manager) had a bit of bother, Ger put it down to the fact that he was only trying to clear up that three-year mess (Daly's management reign). You know, what did I do to deserve this?

"If he has problems with Harry (Bohan, former Clare selector under Daly) . . . Harry doesn't know where that's coming from either.

"The (Clare) players are still great friends. I don't meet fellas now (regularly) . . . but we try and go away twice a year for a game of golf - in the summer in Glasson and then go away for a golf weekend before Christmas. So they (Loughnane and Considine) won't go anymore because they know there's tension. That's the way it is now.

"Look, if I'm the cause of the tension, I'd be the first to hold my hands up. I don't think I am. I can look in the mirror and say, 'I didn't cause this'.

"It's sad. It's sad," he says, shaking his head. "That's the only word to describe it. You know I meet fellas from other counties and they say, 'Jeez, it's feckin' awful. From talking to lads, you know the Cork-Tipp rivalry. Babs (Keating, former Tipperary manager) would be in the thick of it: 'You remember that day, Nicky? You kicked it past Cunningham. Hah?' They'd still have brilliant days out. They'd meet up with the Cork lads and they have an auld golf tournament with each other."

"He is stone mad," reckons Keating, reclining in the psychiatrist's chair. "I got the job of analysing the book (Loughnane's Raising the Banner) for the Sunday Times. When I went through the things he wrote, the things he said about his own county men, it sickened me. Then I cut him to pieces in the paper.

"The following September, we were both asked to do something for charity, sponsored by Toyota. I said it to the wife going off, 'I dread this meeting, now'. I got there and I was having a meal. Now if he wrote about me, I'd have hit him a box.

"He came in, and he was all over me, shaking hands and, 'great to see ya'. He couldn't be nicer to me. I was saying to myself, 'what kind of fella are you at all'? Hah? I was sitting down thinking, 'I'm not too sure he's right'. That's the way he is."

"Ah, there's a streak of madness in Ger alright," adds former Clare hurler Michael O'Halloran. "There is. I talked to other people from other counties and they'll all say the same - you know he could say something about you on the Sunday Game and if he went into Dublin to a hotel and met you that night, he'd have the big shake hands. There is that streak of madness to him and maybe that's what drives him as well.

"Maybe that's what made him good in the first place, I don't know, but he's definitely not your normal, sober kind of a Brian Cody or Nicky English or any of these fellas.

"And the thing is that once he started, he wasn't rowing back. That's the thing about him. A bit like '98, once he got on his high horse, there was no bringing him back down from it. I think once then people started carping and he saw there was a bit of a reaction, for some reason he decided I'm not gonna flinch here, I'm not gonna back down. I'm gonna keep calling it as I see it.

"The only other thing about Ger is - and I've heard it in Cork (where O'Halloran lives) particularly is that it would have killed him to see someone else winning with basically his team.

"He should have acknowledged in 2000 when he stepped down that he had done what he could, he'd taken them as far as he could and move on, much like the Kerry manager steps down - Jack O'Connor steps down and Pat O'Shea comes in and wins an All-Ireland, and it's great. Jack O'Connor doesn't start slagging off the Kerry team."

Daly is troubled too by American writer Gore Vidal's old adage that, "it's not enough to succeed, others must fail, especially your friends".

"I think there's something inside of him," he says, "I have to admit now - that he was the man that had won for Clare and I think inside in us all, deep down, we must overcome that at times. If I had won club championships for Clarecastle somewhere deep down, there's a morsel . . . anyone's a liar that tells you that you're not thinking, 'Jeez, someone else now is stealing my bit of glory on me'.

"You must overcome that as a human-being. You have to say, 'Damn it. It's my club. I'm bigger than this. By Jaysus, I'll back him to the last.' I think it overcame Ger a bit. That he was a little bit scared that we would get there . . . and we almost got there. That's my honest opinion. I could be well wrong. I could be well wrong. I could be well wide of the mark."

"I'm fond of him, but I could see where you'd fall in love or you could get sucked in with that whole, guru, celebrity (status)," suggests an All-Ireland-winning manager of his generation. "I really think you have to step back and not believe your own publicity, maybe.

"There could be an element that he has believed his own publicity a little bit and that's then distanced himself from the team and I'll be straight about it, there's no way I would distance myself from the players I was involved with because I'm a different personality.

"I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did, but Ger is quite comfortable in his own skin doing that and maybe he's a stronger character because of that. It wouldn't be my way, but in fairness to him, that's his way and he's entitled (to his way)."

Although this is a sentiment you will hear paraded, that Loughnane suffers from hubris, the logic doesn't wholly apply. He's not an ostentatious man. He's still rooted to the simple, rural locale in which he grew up. His behaviour hasn't altered in the last 15 years or indeed going further back; it's just that his platform has broadened. He's always been wildly opinionated and overzealous.

"I first got a taste of managing from a schools team in Shannon," he writes in Raising the Banner. "I remember once we were playing in Newmarket. The referee, a teacher from the other school, got so annoyed with me that he threw the whistle over the line and walked off the field! He said, 'I've enough of this lunatic', and disappeared!"

You get the sense that if Ollie Baker's fortuitous goal against Cork in June, 1995 hadn't gone in and changed the course of hurling history, Loughnane would probably be busy today making a nuisance of himself with Department of Education heads rather than GAA authorities.

With Clare, there was no time you ever thought of pulling back in your criticisms? I ask.

"No. No," replies Loughnane.

There was no way of sugaring the pill?

"No. No. No."

You weren't worried about upsetting relationships?

"Listen," he says, laughing, "When players played under me I told them exactly how they played when they were inside in the field. I told them who went to town on them. They all knew exactly where I stood.

"Now, funnily enough, when they heard me say it on television, there was a lot more resentment on their part because they still imagined that I was still manager of the Clare team, that I was a manager. It's very hard for a player to separate in their mind . . . if they're with you for five or six or seven years, there is a huge bond there between you, but when you are doing analysis on a team it's a completely different thing. You have to look at it from a totally different point of view.

"It's funny, last Saturday night I was looking at Alan Hansen and (Alan) Shearer on Match of the Day; pure fluke that I should turn over, and they were drawing Shearer about becoming involved with Newcastle and Hansen was encouraging him to become involved and he saw him as the Number One, and your man (the presenter) says, 'yeah, you'll be his number one and in three months' time, you won't be talking to him'.

"It's gas, isn't it? Isn't it gas? That's what it is. Because if you do it properly and I wouldn't do it unless I was going to do it properly, but if you do it properly you have to cut yourself away, you're no longer in the dressingroom, you're no longer in the Clare dressingroom, you're in nobody's dressingroom, you're looking at it from a totally different point of view.

"I wasn't the manager of the Clare team when I was on television, I was gone from it. I was gone. I was totally divorced from it, but it's very hard for a player in his mind to divorce or separate me as manager of Clare and me, not being manager anymore, now analysing the thing on television and having to come at the thing from a totally different perspective.

"Some would see that as being disloyal to them, but if I was loyal to them and tell lies to them on television. In other words, to say you're playing great when you're not playing great . . ."

But what about Daly? Is that a travesty or does that upset you, if relations aren't the best anymore?

"The way I look at it is there's always going to be a certain amount of resentment when you say it first, but as you let time go by - if you let five or six years go by - that'll all fade away. That'll all be totally different. Whatever about Daly, when Daly was captain of the Clare team, nobody had greater admiration and I've always professed it - the admiration I had for him and I have never, ever seen a better captain than him.

"Anyone you want to captain a team, you want to model themselves on the way he was as captain, but he has to remember there's a difference between Daly as captain and Daly as Citizen Joe as well. There's a big difference or Daly as manager, even a bigger difference.

"When I'm commenting about Daly's decisions as manager, it's as a manager, it's not as Anthony Daly, the captain of the Clare team, Anthony Daly as a person, Anthony Daly as a hurler; it's Anthony Daly as manager of the Clare team. Now again, he probably finds it very hard to separate that, but for me it's totally different."

But ye would have had a bond or shared mutual respect, but that's impaired now, isn't it?

"In Anthony Daly's mind, I'd say it is, but I still have the same regard for him now as I had when he was captain of the Clare team even though I had to tell him at the end of his career that he was no longer captain of the Clare team as well. That cycle always comes," he says, chuckling.

"He knows that I was dead honest when I told him that I think his time for the captaincy was over and that he must be struggling hard enough for his place on the team the last year he played and that we're better off to move on to a new captain and he respected that.

"Now the same way when I moved out of the Clare dressingroom, I was commenting on his performance as a manager not his performance as captain which he was never used to any criticism because I had no reason to ever criticise him as captain of the Clare team because he was exemplary. Players find it hard to differentiate between that. I suppose it's because of their youth as well."

Does that upset you?

"Not in the slightest. Not in the slightest," he says with a giggle. "It doesn't upset me in the slightest. In time, they'll realise that that is what it is. Once you take on a job, whether 'tis as a manager, or as an analyst or whatever you're doing, if you're not really true to yourself, first of all people are going to see through it very fast - even though you might think they won't - and secondly, you'll get no satisfaction out of it.

"Whatever job you're given, unless you do it to the best of your ability and in the most honest way possible, you're going to get no satisfaction out of it."

It is this loose observation that maybe relations are impaired "in Anthony Daly's mind", but not in his own, that hint at a defining trait of Loughnane. The guy has rhinoceros skin.

"If somebody says something critical about him, often he doesn't seem to harbour any ill-feeling (a good quality), but equally if he says nasty, overly personal things about others, he seems oblivious to their feelings (a not so good quality).

A couple of the players he managed to All-Ireland success in the 1990s no longer speak with him. Men he had soldiered with. What is it all for, you wonder? Loughnane believes maybe this animosity has been caused because of "their youth", and that they will come around. But who has acted immaturely in creating the rift, they argue?

"It's a pity," says Fergie Tuohy, former Clare player and current Clare selector. "If you look at all the good managers, if you look at Liam Griffin, he has a great rapport with his old troops.

"Jimmy Barry Murphy would have the same, Donal O'Grady, John Allen, Cyril Farrell above in Galway. (Whereas Loughnane) doesn't give a shite who he pisses off."

Maybe it was written in the stars that Loughnane would grow apart from his former team, like Alex Ferguson's schism with Roy Keane, which led to the player's departure from Manchester United.

Loughnane always maintained a distance of sorts, but for it to happen so dramatically seems a tragedy. Forever forthright in his opinions, he has always been true to himself, a most civilising quality, but maybe to uncivilised lengths.

Where Clare Leads, Ireland Follows, written by Richard Fitzpatrick and published by Mercier Press, is priced €24.99

and will be available in bookshops from Thursday, November 13th.

"When players played under me I told them exactly how they played when they were inside in the field. . .

Now, funnily enough, when they heard me say it on television, there was a lot more resentment on their part.- Ger Loughnane

"Every time Tony (Considine) had a bit of bother, Ger put it down to the fact that he was only trying to clear up that three-year mess (Daly's management reign).

You know, what did I do to deserve this?

- Anthony Daly

"He is stone mad . . . When I went through the things he wrote, the things he said about his own county men, it sickened me. Then I cut him to pieces in the paper. The following September, we were both asked to do something for charity . . . Now if he wrote about me, I'd have hit him a box. He came in, and he was all over me, shaking hands and, 'great to see ya'. He couldn't be nicer to me. I was saying to myself, 'what kind of fella are you at all'?

- Babs Keating