Interview Brian Lohan: Brian Lohan explains to Seán Moran how the qualifiers have affected Clare and why he decided to play another season

in the middle of all the crackling megaphones, creaking relationships and associated dissonant noises in Clare, it's easy to forget the hurling team that nearly heaved last year's All-Ireland off its axis by taking champions Cork to the edge of the abyss and the county that has out-performed its status most consistently since the introduction of the qualifier series.

A cynic could argue that the free-fall with which the county has hit the qualifiers over the past two years has eased the burden of expectation but the durability of Clare since the end of the golden era of the late 1990s has been notable.

As has the durability of some of its players: only five of the players' All Stars selected in the year of Clare's breakthrough All-Ireland in 1995 are still playing senior intercounty hurling. DJ Carey is sitting out the league, Brian Whelahan is recovering from surgery and the other three are from Clare. David Fitzgerald and Brian Lohan line out tomorrow in the Allianz NHL Division One A match with Wexford whereas Seán McMahon is carrying an injury.

It's admirable dedication. Brian Lohan would have been excused had he decided that a polite couple of years after the All-Ireland and Munster medals dried up it was time to concentrate his efforts elsewhere.

He's 33 this year and while tangible reward remains elusive the workload increases.

"Training has become much harder," he says. "I used to enjoy it and look forward to it. Now it's just a hard slog, especially in January and February. It's a combination of me feeling it more - I find sessions an awful lot tougher than younger players who are 22 or 23, and the amount of time dedicated to it, up to five days a week."

This week for instance on top of training on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Clare hurlers head for Wexford this afternoon and will have a light session to loosen up before tomorrow's match. Lohan is realistic about the team's standing in the game, but not fatalistic.

"I think we're playing for the same stakes as we used to," he says. "After last year, coming so close to Cork, we were encouraged although when we analysed it we could see we were a bit farther away than the scoreline suggested. We weren't overall as a team within a point of Cork but it was still a match we could have won. We would feel we can improve on that even if we're not considered to be in the top three likely to win an All-Ireland."

In one respect Clare's world had turned all the way around. Back in their heyday there wasn't another team as capable of preparing so precisely for the championship. Regardless of the league, Clare always hit the ground running come the summer. Recent years have been the inverse and, as a result, championship performance has been poor with the team recovering to register big improvements during the qualifiers.

"We've found it hard to explain our performances in the Munster championship in the past two years, the beatings by Waterford and Tipperary. Last year you'd think the kick up the backside we got in the league final from Kilkenny would have had us right for the championship."

Lohan suspects that the evolution of the championship format farther and farther away from the old, exclusively knockout structure has had an impact on players who needed to be full on to get the best out of themselves. "When everything was at stake we were able to respond. Maybe the back door has affected us. When we were going well we would always have focused well but we had to. At 100 per cent focus we were very good and hard to beat but at 95 per cent focus our performance might only be something like 60 or 70 cent."

The slippage in focus at the start of the past two championship seasons has had the added side-effect of creating tension between the team and former manager Ger Loughnane, now a pundit with the Daily Star and RTÉ, whose criticisms of Clare have at times been as colourful as his firebrand evangelism on behalf of the county once was. In consequence the previously vital relationship between Loughnane and his former captain, now successor as manager, Anthony Daly has disintegrated.

This has been complicated in recent weeks with further outbreaks of bush fire ignited by firstly the departure of the team's long-serving physio, Colum Flynn, and the well-known sports specialist, Ger Hartmann, secondly the overlooking of Loughnane for an achievement award and a resulting series of bizarre claim and counter-claim, much of which has been broadcast on Clare FM to the county's increasingly dismayed populace.

While declining to comment on the current controversy - "This is a clash of personalities and many of the players know those personalities" - Lohan isn't that bothered by Loughnane's punditry. "I'm not affected by it. It completely passes me by and I can't understand why people get so upset over it."

Of more pressing concern has been the need to manage his own fitness and avoid injury. Like the Clare of old, Lohan needs to be 100 per cent. At his best he's still capable of being the most dominant full back in the game but when less than fully fit or niggled and distracted by injury, he looks his age and is vulnerable.

He knows the difference - and its underlying reasons. Work and the lack of it.

"I lost a yard of pace going back to the late 1990s and did something to change that. Weights work improved my speed. Look at the last two years. Last season I'd a lot of work done in November and December. With good core work done, I'm able to get through the season. The year before I hadn't the gym work done and was hardly able to get through an entire game that season. You have to do the extra work or you'll be found out. It's a bit of laziness. You can get soft with yourself, cut corners and think you can get away with it."

The need for all that hard work increasingly intrudes into private and business life. Lohan is opening a second office of his auctioneering firm in Shannon and each end-of-season brings speculation that he will hang up his iconic red helmet. Asked whether he has a set plan or is taking it one year at a time, he confirms what most would suspect.

"I've a fair idea of what I'd be doing. Circumstances change on a yearly basis - I expected last year to be my last but after the Cork match, decided to continue - but this will be my last."

So in all likelihood this is the last lap. The attention to detail is still as strong and the unfolding season will tell if Brian Lohan can, from the edge of the Clare square, hold back the years and ever-younger full forwards. The intensity and rigorous self-analysis are the same so he can see the change from the impatient young star of a decade ago, living with his parents and cocooned in his own world.

"I probably haven't the same single mindedness. Ten years ago when I was preparing for a match I'd the headphones in the ears, getting myself right. It's not something I think about too much, but I'm different to what I was. Still, I'm hard to live with the week of a match."