Frank Lohan: Keith Duggan meets one of Clare's feted full-back line, for 10 years irreplaceable and a reliable presence at brother Brian's shoulder

Frank Lohan did not feel like a fugitive exactly during his years of working and living in Cork city, but at the same time, he kept his distance. "Y'know, when you're in a different camp, you kind of steer clear," he says apologetically.

"I would have known a few of the Cork lads from college days, but not particularly well. And anyhow, even though the job was there, everything else revolved around Clare because of the hurling. And in that way, it was a pity because Cork is a great city, there is a lot going on there and I never got a huge chance to enjoy it."

We meet in the Temple Gate Hotel in Ennis on one of those showery, poorly lit August evenings that hint at the end of summer. Clare had run through their penultimate training session, and afterwards the team ate together in the vast diningroom that still bears an architectural resemblance to the old church from which it is converted.

For Frank Lohan, over the past 11 years of intercounty hurling, only the scenery has changed. Prompted, he spreads a copy of the Clare People on the polished table in the foyer to examine an all-time list of the 15 players with most championship appearances.

Christy Ring, whose career at the top spanned a staggering three decades, predictably sets the pace with 64 outings for Cork. Clare's eternal boys of summer - Davy Fitzgerald (second overall with 59 appearances), Seánie McMahon (50), Brian (53) and Frank Lohan (48) are all included. Only Kilkenny are more handsomely represented, but with men who shone in different eras.

The longevity and consistency of Clare's rearguard has become the abiding legacy of a remarkable period for the county. And tomorrow, Frank Lohan will equal the appearance record of Jack Rochford, the Three Castles man who hurled for 15 years with Kilkenny before the first World War.

"There are some very famous names there," Lohan murmurs, his eyes falling on John Doyle, Eddie Keher and Sim Walton. Genuinely warm and friendly like his brother, Frank also shares Brian's discomfort with any form of exaggeration or praise. He simply does not go in for sensation, apologising when he reckons an opinion has not been jazzy enough and smiling uneasily at the list, which is a kind of praise in its own right.

"And it's an honour, I suppose, to be included among them. Kind of goes to show the way the interest or coverage has intensified as well. Like, a few years ago, you would rarely have seen a chart like that.

"Just hope we can add a few more to it."

It is fitting that only Clare stand between the spectacle of a third All-Ireland final featuring Kilkenny and Cork in four years. Under the stewardship of Anthony Daly, Clare have somehow been transformed from calibrated, high-octane championship-match specialists to a more slow-burning but defiantly consistent group. Commendable recoveries from Munster championship setbacks have become their modus operandi.

"That has happened a bit now," agrees Lohan. "Maybe it has just taken us longer to get up to speed with championship hurling. It is no secret. And it has suited us over the last few years to get on a roll. But it wasn't a set plan to go out and bomb the first game. It has just happened like that.

"And the fact is, we haven't won anything in a long time and are keen to change that. The qualifier route seems to be the route that suits us. And I am not sure why that is."

Waterford, Tipperary and Cork have all inflicted forms of chastisement on Clare in the past few seasons. Inevitable valedictory statements, laced with some acerbic criticism, accompanied each defeat.

That was particularly true on a greasy afternoon against Tipperary in Limerick last June, when the general wisdom was that the heart of the Clare defence had stayed on too long. The commanding figure of Brian Lohan took the brunt of the criticism but Frank's performance was also harshly judged.

"It was a day I felt quite good," he says, throwing his eyes to heaven, "but we were very dead and by 10 minutes in, the script was written for my performance. Suffer a bad start and you are in trouble - even though we did get back into it.

"There is no proportionality. Ups and downs are always extreme. You wouldn't want to dwell on it. And the coverage of games has just ballooned. For some reason, though, when Clare have a bad performance, it gets noticed."

A steady course of rehabilitation last season culminated in a classic semi-final against Cork, when Clare hurled with the kind of purposeful fury of old and almost, almost, blew the All-Ireland champions away. Reviewing those last 15 minutes, Frank Lohan speaks in a low-key, forensic way. Although John Allen's celebrated exchange of Neil Ronan for Brian Corcoran was regarded as altering the balance of the encounter in Cork's favour, Lohan believes the reasons were more diffuse.

"I didn't pay a huge amount of attention. Brian had been going well and we were going well. Maybe Cork had started to come into it a little bit. You find in most matches the full back is taken away from the square - it will definitely happen on Sunday. And even in that first half, Brian was taken away from the square - I remember distinctly one ball out near the 65 near the sideline. So it does happen.

"Maybe it is just an overall momentum, Cork winning balls everywhere and then the scores start coming. Maybe we were playing for the whistle, we lost five or six points in that last 15 minutes.

"It happened the last day as well when Cork pipped Waterford, with Ronan Curran coming so strongly into the game."

Maybe Waterford, like Clare last year, were foolish in letting so much ball rain down on the storming Cork half-back line during the critical period?

"Yeah, but you can't say that. There is obviously a man on their half backs too and maybe in the first half that man was winning more ball. It looks like the problem is with the guy hitting the ball when maybe it is actually with the guy contesting the ball. And that is the same the other side too. As defenders, we probably weren't winning the ball as we had in the first half.

"The hard and fast of it is Cork were a bit better than us that day. Maybe just about, but they were. And we were really gutted."

The granite quality of that match meant this summer's Munster championship return fixture was eagerly anticipated, but once again Clare were well off the pace at the finish and Cork sauntered to an easy victory.

That night in a restaurant, Frank Lohan happened to meet Ger Loughnane. The former Clare manager once described the younger of Gus Lohan's boys as "the ideal young man in modern Ireland" and, as Frank testifies, "he had faith in me and kept me on the team when others might not have done."

Their relationship was always formal. Frank Lohan was attentive, tough, diligent and exceptionally good in the years when Loughnane was the most loyal, charismatic and frightening sports coach in the country. But after Loughnane stepped down, he simply didn't see him anymore.

He was not the kind of coach you buzzed for an idle chit-chat, nor were you likely to bump into him in the frozen-goods section of Dunnes on Christmas Eve. When Loughnane stopped turning up to train the Clare boys, he lived mostly in their imaginations.

"I hadn't seen him in about four years. And he gave me his opinion of that Cork game - in typical Ger fashion. I have no problem with Ger. As far as the criticism goes, I understand he doesn't see it as that. And it is true that he probably said a thousand worse things to us as players. But it was different then; it was in-house. I never heard him say anything too hurtful about me. But I am sure it will come.

"Ger is very single-minded in everything he does. He is a very smart, engaging man and, from what I have seen, he is very good at the analysis as well. Most of the time he is fair but I think that when he has an agenda, he can be hard. Like, he was very tough on the Limerick hurlers as well, I felt. But he just sees it as being honest. When he was manager, Ger had his own style. So did Cyril Lyons. Now Anthony has come in and done a massive job. And he is not going to try and ape anyone. That is my opinion, anyhow.

"And people say he has been too loyal to some of us and should have axed us long ago. I feel the set-up he has in place is great and it has got us back to an All-Ireland semi-final, a position from which we can hammer it home - if we are good enough. History has a very simple way of defining these things and it comes down to winning."

Clare have not beaten Kilkenny in the All-Ireland championship since the semi-final in 1997, when James O'Connor went supernova with a 0-9 display. The Kilkenny full-forward line that day was PJ Delaney, Ken O'Shea and Charlie Carter. The Clare full-back line was Michael O'Halloran, Brian Lohan and Frank Lohan.

Although Brian has laboured and recovered from injuries in this decade, Frank has been a steadfast presence, deputising at full back on days when his brother could not line out. The only time they did not play alongside one another was when Daly asked Frank to audition as a forward.

"I was gung-ho for it," he smiles. "And I got a few goals early on and I was thinking, this sure beats chasing a nippy corner forward about the place. But the only real championship game I got was against Waterford and that was a fair disaster for us. I hit three points in that game though and I remember thinking then, feck it, I wouldn't mind a real crack at this. But it never materialised."

Regardless of Frank's potential as a glory-grabber, the idea of the Lohan brothers operating at different ends of the field did not seem right. Frank admits that although they have been playing beside one another for so long they are primarily just team-mates, there remains a subconscious familial instinct to look out for one another, be that through the deep understanding that has developed over the years or through bluntly eating the head off one another.

"Trust me, it is usually Brian effing me out of it when it comes to that," he laughs.

"But yeah, blood is thicker than water and all. But our family wouldn't be great for chatting about hurling. And that probably stems from our father, Gus; he was never one to give advice. He let us find our own way. And so playing alongside Brian, we never made too much of it.

"Fitzy is good to talk, obviously, and Brian as well. My attitude would be, you don't say anything unless it is merited. We're brothers, yeah, and that makes is slightly different but neither of us has anything else to compare it to."

Back in the first half of the 1990s, when Clare hurling was on the cusp of something remarkable, a small Q&A article appeared in the Sunday Tribune in which one of the Lohans detailed a major regret as not being able to attend a performance by the cult band American Music Club at the Olympia.

"Oh yeah, that was Brian," Frank laughs. "That band, now, would be before my time."

It was a memorable bit of trivia because it was a vivid illumination of the fact that being a stoic and brilliant hurling full back did not cancel out the simple, anonymous pleasure of being lost in the crowd at a music show featuring solemn, romantic songsmiths. As it happens, Frank likes his tunes as well. The great, eponymous Stone Roses LP affected him as profoundly as Loughnane would do a few years later - but in a very different way, of course.

When pressed, he sheepishly concedes that a more recent escape has been in surfing. Michelle, his fiancee, has brothers that are serious on a board, and through persuasion, competitive instinct and curiosity, he has come to visit the waters at Lahinch in all kinds of weather.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not like a surf dude or anything. But it's a nice place to be, the ocean, a great way to pass a few hours."

It is certainly a hell of a lot more peaceful and solitary than his primary sporting pursuit. Frank Lohan isn't fully certain who he will be marking tomorrow, other than "it will be a Kilkenny man with a lot of talent, and you can take your pick."

All he knows is that he is glad to be still out there with the other Clare lifers. Not as eye-catching as Brian in full battle mode or as vocal as Fitzgerald or as central to the narrative as McMahon, Frank Lohan is perhaps the most inscrutable of that fabulous four, coolly intelligent, for 10 years irreplaceable, a great and reliable presence at his brother's shoulder. And always, always his own man.