GAELIC GAMES:FIESTA! SO AFTER some weekends of banal and fumbling preliminaries none of which set the pulse jogging let alone racing, the championship season has begun and they are off in a helter-skelter of shocks, surprises and good, old-fashioned upsets.

Clare made the short journey up the Ennis Road to the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick yesterday to play the Munster champions, Waterford.

Clare knew well it was a somewhat longer journey back in time, five years to be precise, to the last occasion on which they won a game in Munster.

Waterford, on the other hand, have customer-loyalty cards for the Last Chance Saloon. They have been written off almost every year since they broke through, and the absence of a few key players and the sight of them having surrendered their National League crown with relative equanimity in the spring did little to alter the odds.

Clare exploded though. They are under the tutelage this year of Mike McNamara, the Scarriff man who oversaw a lot of the more draining aspects of the legendary preparations Clare teams underwent back in the 1990s.

McNamara's personality seems suited to the task of getting some of the fire back into the cold furnace Clare's collective gut had become.

Yesterday Clare arrived as a team who looked capable of giving it a rattle and left as a side who could make the Munster final if they prevail over their neighbours Limerick in a few weeks.

They watched without panic as Waterford scored the first three points of the afternoon, and then they put down their cocktails and went to work themselves.

A string of five unanswered points drew a riposte at last from John Mullane, before the Waterford defence was caught flatfooted by a long ball from Pat Donnellan which dropped to the championship debutant Mark Flaherty.

A quick, blurry shuffle of feet and Flaherty was free. He drove it to the net as if practising in his back garden.

It was tempting to sit back at that stage and scribble that Clare were emphatically back. That might indeed be what Clare did. Having helped themselves to the tonic of a goal, they dozed off as Waterford reeled in six points without reply.

Waterford will be a little dazed and confused about what happened next. They did pretty much everything they would have set out to do. Mullane had one of those days (he was Man of the Match on television) and scored eight points from play. Every single free Waterford earned Dave Bennett converted, nine in all. And they scored 23 points.

Clare, though, were unimpressed and spoke afterwards about always finding Waterford a very open side to play against. Their contention was underlined by their total of 2-26 in this game.

More surprising perhaps was Waterford's failure for the first time in several seasons to find a route to goal during a championship game.

Almost emblematic of that failure was the circumstance of Dan Shanahan, the happy rainmaker of last summer, the man whose inability to stop scoring goals earned him the player-of-the-season award. Yesterday he was a peripheral figure who was made by the snappishness of the Clare defence to look ponderous in his striking.

He was hauled ashore with 10 minutes left, and though the move was reasonable given the predicament his side was in, Big Dan effected a neat body swerve when Justin McCarthy reached to pat him on the back as he came off. That disappointing flash of petulance was the quickest burst Dan had all afternoon.

For Clare the sight of Shanahan being hauled in was surely encouraging. They knew, and were at pains to point out several times in the aftermath, that Waterford were missing a handful of All Stars and that Stephen Molumphy - who was at least on the field - had not, following a nine-month stint with the Army in Germany, quite as much hurling under his belt as was required.

On the other hand, when things go well they go really well. Tony Griffin, who returned to Ireland from college in Canada only at the end of April, scored five points from play. The debutant Flaherty scored 1-7 (1-2 from play), and Diarmuid McMahon stepped up to the plate showing the sort of ability he has been exhibiting in flashes for several years.

And at midfield the old warhorse Colin Lynch had a splendid afternoon, bossing the sector and scoring two points into the bargain. His withdrawal soon after that of Shanahan was one of those designed to allow a veteran warrior the luxury of his own round of applause. That garland was duly accorded.

Clare had led by the width of a goal at half-time but drove their authority home early in the second half with a series of fine scores, the best from Flaherty, who caught a nice short-stick pass from McMahon and drove it skimming over the bar.

Waterford never got back to closer than three points, and the game effectively ended when McMahon made another fine pass inside, this time to the veteran Niall Gilligan, who put it away with ease.

So Clare, a side who even in their halcyon days of the 1990s seemed to suffer for want of decent forward support for Jamesie O'Connor, romped away with it and set the Munster championship alight.

Waterford, whose task that has been for a decade now, must wait five weeks to play the losers of the Galway versus Antrim game and hope that once again they can survive that last chance at their traditional watering hole.