Like its football equivalent in a few days, the All-Ireland hurling final was all the more interesting for producing a pairing that hadn’t been for a while. In the 10 years since Cork and Clare last met, either Limerick or Kilkenny were in all but one final.
An important element of this novelty is the encouragement it extends to counties that maybe they too could make it through a championship and have some share in the biggest day of the year.
Next year it will be 20 championships since Cork took home Liam MacCarthy — an extraordinary and unprecedented stretch for one of the top two counties in the game.
They reached a final, bouncing as of old and full of confidence in their newly evolved team after bringing to an end Limerick’s hardening hopes of becoming the first hurling team to win the almost mythical five-in-a-row.
Back in April after Clare had sustained an almighty crash, from nine points ahead of the champions to three behind when the whistle sounded, a wagering man would have got long odds on the significance of a “drive for five” ultimately proving to be Clare’s fifth, rather than Limerick’s record-breaking sequence.
They were outsiders, largely because of Cork’s dazzling takedown of the champions, who for the second time found themselves struggling with long puck-outs and opponents no longer prepared to be passive.
Clare’s claims were not, however, far-fetched. For two seasons they too had run Limerick close in championships ultimately won by John Kiely’s team. They also had one priceless asset, residual experience of winning an All-Ireland.
In his analysis of last weekend’s final, Nicky English wrote about one of the views of former Tipperary All-Ireland winner and selector Donie Nealon.
“To quote him again, having All-Ireland winners on a team makes it easier to pass on the baton to a new generation. It gets a bit tougher when no one in the group has a medal.”
The consciousness of that power of tradition was exemplified at the end of the 1996 final when Liam Griffin’s Wexford management decided to send on 19-year-old Paul Codd so that Wexford could have a player who’d won an All-Ireland on the field of play for at least another decade.
It proved futile for Wexford but Clare had four starting players who had lined out in 2013, plus another, Peter Duggan, who was a panellist as well as two replacements, Paul Flanagan and Seadna Morey, who had also been involved 11 years ago.
It was a sign of how young that team had been and testament to the barren interim that they were all seeking just a second medal.
Desire for a second All-Ireland may seem an avaricious motivation compared to that of Cork’s Séamus Harnedy and Patrick Horgan — the latter, whose career is nearly conterminous with his county’s famine — but it’s not.
I remember 30 years ago talking to Down footballers who had just won a second Sam Maguire, three years after the county’s first in nearly a quarter of a century. They were strongly of the view that the 1994 victory was infinitely sweeter, a view shaped by the sharp disappointments of the intervening seasons.
Imagine the thoughts of those Clare hurlers, who had spent 11 years trying to recapture the achievement of their youth and had turned from young men — a couple of them teenagers — into 30-somethings with little sign of that second medal, which would in some strange way authenticate the first.
If the twilight scenes of that autumnal evening in September 2013 brought to mind the fairy magic of hurling folklore in which mortal hurlers were whisked away to another world to play ghostly matches, it was possible to think of the Clare players borne off to some Tír na nÓg from they eventually returned on Sunday as older men.
They were all phenomenal. David McInerney, full back and an All-Star in 2013, may have surfed his luck a bit in the second half but, having been man of the match in the semi-final against Kilkenny, he went on to play an equally crucial role in a half-back line that confounded Cork’s area of previous strength.
Beside him, John Conlon, a young wing forward 11 years ago, who was converted by manager Brian Lohan into a centre back not long after winning an All-Star at full forward, faced an intensely personal challenge. Opponent Shane Barrett was probably Hurler of the Year, had Cork won.
His pace and predatory instincts were expected to pressurise the 35-year-old but with the assistance of captain Tony Kelly, who patrolled the deeper reaches of Barrett’s zone and allowed Conlon to sit back a bit, they defused the threat.
By the end, the Clonlara veteran was making ruthless dispossessions and emerging from teeming rucks with the sliotar, his acquisitions signalled by his red helmet, the signature accessory of his manager when he bestrode the game at the turn of the century.
Kelly went on to reach those occasional galaxies where his otherworldly skills appear to belong. As someone who has known such frustrating times since 2013, right up to the ankle injuries from which he struggled to recover this season, Sunday was stellar vindication of the permanence of class.
Then, what to make of Shane O’Donnell, who has consistently lit up the championship months, but who last Tuesday was devastated by a hamstring injury that looked certain to cost him this yearned-for second chance. Somehow, he was patched together in the full knowledge that he could pull up at any stage.
For all that, with the contest beginning to surge beyond them as they were hit by Cork’s early force de frappe — in the teams’ first nine shots by the 14th minute, Cork had 1-8 whereas Clare were labouring to 0-4.
Aidan McCarthy’s goal was entirely the result of O’Donnell’s ball-winning, his ability to ride tackles and the laser instinct to win back possession after the ball was spilt, wriggle through tackles and a foul and yet lay off a perfect scoring assist.
Truth be told, Clare did what all teams aspire to — produced their best display on the biggest day of the year. Previous defensive inconsistencies were eliminated to the point that the Sunday Game named corner backs, Adam Hogan and Conor Leen on the programme’s team of the year.
Still, they just about got past a Cork side whose best performers were subdued by Clare’s magnificent rearguard. It augurs well for Pat Ryan’s team but nothing comes easy.
The new champions will testify to that.
