People often say to me, ‘Ye were very unlucky not to win three All-Irelands.’ I always say in return, ‘Do you realise how lucky we were to win two All-Irelands?’ ... I go back to the match against Cork in the Munster championship in ’95. We should have been beaten out the gate, but we weren’t, and we went on to win the All-Ireland. If we had lost that day the Clare officials would have had the perfect excuse to bury me.” Ger Loughnane in Raising the Banner
Alan Browne and Brian Lohan meet at auctioneers conferences now, two successful businessmen in the foothills of middle age. At that stage of life, reminiscence flows in the bloodstream of conversations, like cholesterol. Remember when?
Browne likes to remind Lohan of 1995. The Cork full forward was in his rookie season, about to repeat his Leaving Cert three days after the Munster semi-final. Lohan was in his first All-Star season, although there were few signs of it in the Gaelic Grounds. Browne roasted him.
“In those days, if you threw your helmet off things were getting serious,” says Browne now. “I saw the red helmet go [from Lohan’s head] and I said, ‘Oh f**k.’”
It didn’t halt his gallop. Browne had scored 1-2 before he set up Kevin Murray for Cork’s third goal in the last dregs of normal time. When Cork needed an equaliser deep in stoppage time, Browne took a shot that cannoned off an upright and landed in Murray’s hand, half a dozen paces from the Clare goal.
The game had landed on this precipice. The Cork corner forward threw up the ball to strike and Frank Lohan flicked out his hurley, like a lizard’s tongue.
“I often said, if he had scored, would Davy Fitz and Anthony Daly have become the GAA personalities that that are now?” says Browne. “It’s like that movie Sliding Doors. If they had lost, where would they have gone?”
There are no alternative histories, but there are turning points and tipping points. Of all the earthquaking games Clare played in 1995, the Cork match has fallen through the cracks of popular memory. Back then, Clare’s world spun on the outcome.
In the old knockout system, championship matches were often played at the edge of an abyss. Defeats were a dead loss. “If Clare are beaten,” Kevin Cashman wrote in The Sunday Independent on the morning of the match, “they may – nay will! – wither.” He tipped Cork.
The chips were stacked on the table. All in. “You have no idea how important it was,” says James O’Connor now. “The way we had trained [that winter], if we had lost that game, I don’t know how we would have gone back even. I shudder to think what would have happened if we had lost that game. It unconscionable. Where would we have gone to? We couldn’t have done any more.”
The outrageous truth and the fantastical mythology that would later surround Clare’s training methods were still unknown. Just then, they didn’t have a story to tell. In the public perception, Clare hadn’t changed. A month earlier they had lost the league final by nine points to Kilkenny; in the previous two Munster finals they had been beaten by an aggregate of 27 points. They hadn’t won a Munster title in 63 years.
Occasionally they trained twice on the same day. There were tortuous hill runs, and obstacle courses, and rugby tackle bags and lawless training matches, all designed to stress their bodies and steel their minds
How much hope survived? A pitiful crowd of just 14,101 turned up at the Gaelic Grounds to witness the demolition derby. Cork arrived with their exhaust pipe scraping the tarmac, belching black smoke. They were bereft of hope too.
“For some reason we attracted massive support for the league final,” wrote Mike McNamara in his autobiography, To Hell and Back. “When the heavy defeat came it poisoned a lot of supporters off the notion of following the team any more.”
It was Loughnane’s first year as manager and McNamara’s first as trainer. Between them, they decided that the only cure for Clare’s suffering was to prescribe further suffering.
They started training on Tuesday September 5th, two days after the 1994 All-Ireland hurling final, and played Cork on Sunday June 4th, nine months later. In that time, they gathered for more than 150 sessions. Some of them were at dawn. Occasionally they trained twice on the same day. There were tortuous hill runs, and obstacle courses, and rugby tackle bags and lawless training matches, all designed to stress their bodies and steel their minds.
But to what end? If they couldn’t beat a mixum-gatherum Cork team, where were they going? “Seven of this Cork team have little experience at this level,” said Ger Canning, teeing up the live coverage on RTÉ. “Four of them made their debuts against Kerry [in the first round]. Kevin Murray, Alan Browne and Kieran Morrison in the full forward line are largely unknown outside their own county.”
For Clare, what could go wrong?
* * *
In so many ways, it was an extraordinary match. For the guts of an hour, the hurling was desperate. The shooting was scattergun and cockeyed: Clare ended the game with a staggering 20 wides; Cork had 14.
“It reminds me of the soccer match last night between Ireland and Liechtenstein [a calamitous 0-0 draw for Jack Charlton’s team],” said Eamon Cregan in co-commentary. “Everything Clare are doing at the moment is wrong … Their first touch is poor. They’re failing to get the ball up. They’re getting frustrated.”
In later years Loughane and McNamara both conceded that they had picked the wrong team. Four players who would start the All-Ireland final three months later were named among the substitutes: Frank Lohan, Ollie Baker, Ger “Sparrow” O’Loughlin and Stephen McNamara. For such a critical game it was a catastrophic lapse of judgment.
On the morning of the game, though, O’Loughlin was granted a late reprieve. Eamon Taaffe was named to start but had picked up a hamstring strain. It was a providential turn of events: O’Loughlin finished with 1-3, the top scorer in the game. “I can’t remember why I wasn’t named in the 15. I don’t think I was flavour of the month really at the time. It was obviously a mistake by Loughnane,” O’Loughlin says now, straight-faced.
Clare played with the wind in the first half and trailed by three points at half-time. Cork scored two goals, both poorly defended; Davy Fitzgerald cocked up for the first one. “It was off my left,” says Browne, “and I wasn’t great off my left. I’d say he was kicking himself after the goal went in. It was bread and butter stuff.”
By the break, Clare’s season was hanging by a thread. “I remember Loughnane saying at half-time that the ship has sprung a leak but we’re not going down,” says O’Connor. “That’s a direct quote – although the language was a bit more flowery than that. We had to dig deep and answer a lot of questions. We had to show a level of defiance.”
“That’s where Loughnane was at his best,” says O’Loughlin. “It had to be this year. It wasn’t going to be the following year – it had to be this year.”
Barry Egan was O’Connor’s opponent at centre field, and he was feeling the heat. “Barry Egan was known to be fast as well,” says Fergie Tuohy, “and I remember Jamesie came in at half time and said to us, ‘Barry Egan is after telling me to slow down.’”
The advantage that Clare were banking on was fitness, not just against Cork, but against all-comers. It was bound to kick in. Wasn’t it?
Shortly after half-time Cork went five points clear. Clare brought it back to level with 15 minutes left. All bets were off.
“I just remember in the second half, Loughnane seemed to be everywhere,” says O’Connor. “He was suddenly on the pitch. Everywhere you looked he seemed to be there. He was in your face, waving a fist and he was just pumped up and driving on. To me, that was the day Loughnane cut loose. Before that, I think Loughnane himself felt that he had to be detached and unemotional and making strategic calls on the sideline and the rest of it.
“There was a transformation that day. All the stuff that he brought in terms of his energy and his drive and his commitment, I felt this is what the team needed from him – this was him being himself. I drew inspiration from him being out on the pitch. He had such a force of personality that I think the team got energy from it. He was what the team needed him to be on that particular day – especially when Seanie [McMahon] got injured.”
With less than 15 minutes to go McMahon broke his collar bone in a collision with Mark Mullins. He couldn’t continue; he had to continue. “The two of us just clashed, a good old fashioned ground stroke,” says McMahon. “I got there just ahead of him, and I was just that bit open. It was a pure accident.
“The pain was more afterwards than immediate. I knew it was sore, but you were in the middle of a game, and you thought you’d get through it.”
In those days only three substitutes were permitted, and Clare had already brought on Ollie Baker, Frank Lohan and Stephen McNamara. Loughnane asked him to stand at corner forward and walked halfway across the pitch alongside him. The break had been on the left side of his collar bone; McMahon was right-handed. That bounce of the ball was crucial.
“I was lucky it was on that side because there’s no way in the wide earthly world that I’d have been able to swing the hurley if it was on the other side.”
“It’s terrible for Clare that Seanie McMahon has to stay on,” said Cregan in commentary. “He only has one hand, and he can’t even go near the ball.”
In the last 15 minutes the game exploded. The lead changed hands four times. O’Loughlin’s goal put Clare in front with only a couple of minutes left; Murray’s goal restored Cork’s lead with 69 minutes on the clock.
Then lightning struck. A ball came into McMahon’s orbit in the right corner. He couldn’t pick it up, he couldn’t make a meaningful swing. “I was just flicking away at it [on the ground],” says McMahon, “and Timmy Kelleher came across and ended up flicking it out for a sideline.”
“I tried to play the ball ahead of Sean and then run on to it, but it went too far and went for a line ball,” said Kelleher years later. “I get a lump in my throat every time I see it on television.”
The line ball was about 40 metres out. The game was in stoppage time. Clare needed a goal. Fergie Tuohy had no pedigree as a taker of line balls. Clare’s season was tied to a rail track. The train was coming.
“I never took one since,” says Tuohy. “It was just spur of the moment. I was closest to the ball. The clock was running down. I do distinctly remember Anthony Daly coming up the sideline looking for a quick one. ‘Fergie, Fergie,’ – he was roaring at me. I just thought I’d have a lash anyway.
“Sure, look, it was a fluke. But I don’t tell my children that.”
The ball flew towards the Cork goalmouth; in the mayhem Baker met it with his hurley and deflected the ball to the net.
“We got the breaks that Clare hadn’t got in previous years,” says O’Connor. “We got a massive break with Baker’s goal. Tuohy never took a line ball before in his life and what Baker was doing in there is anyone’s guess.”
“I would say as a group of players we just had enough of losing,” says McMahon. “Whatever had to be done was just going to be done. Ollie Baker went up full forward to score a goal. Frank Lohan cleared a ball off the line. Fergie Tuohy cut a ball in. Lohan got rid of the helmet. Whatever had to be done.”
In sport, winners’ stories are always told from back to front. In that narrative dynamic, everything has a self-fulfilling air.
In the euphoria of the Clare dressingroom Loughnane framed the achievement without pausing for breath. In his post-match interviews, there was often an element of soft propaganda and spin. “This was, without doubt,” he said, breathlessly, “the greatest victory Clare have achieved in all my time being involved with hurling in the county. Certainly, no team in the modern era fought so bravely or with so much heart.”
In his Irish Times column, Jimmy Barry-Murphy took a detached view: “It was an amazing finish to a match of a very poor standard,” he wrote. “It’s hard to see Clare winning anything when they’re hitting 19 or 20 wides in a match. The implications for Cork are that a number of players didn’t look up to championship hurling. For Cork, it’s all about rebuilding.”
It was the first time in Clare’s history that they had beaten Cork in consecutive championship matches. By the time that sequence ended in 1998, they had beaten Cork four times in a row, the same record as the current Clare team.
What did they beat in 1995? Of the 24 players on the Cork panel that day, only five were still involved when Cork won the All-Ireland four years later. The Irish Examiner’s esteemed GAA correspondent Jim O’Sullivan wrote that Cork had reached “their lowest ebb since the early 1960s.” Cork’s crisis was of no consequence to Clare. The championship was full of binary outcomes. One team always fell into the abyss.
Johnny Clifford, one of Cork hurling’s greatest servants, stood down as manager after the game and Barry-Murphy, his great friend, took over for the following season. Slowly, that was the start of something too.
“It was a funny time to be involved with Cork,” says Browne. “Even in the league, we hadn’t gone anywhere. We weren’t overly competitive, to be honest. If you look at that team now – and no disrespect to anybody – but you didn’t hear too much about them afterwards. If Cork had won that game, I don’t think Cork would have gone any further.”
After the final whistle, the drama took an unsavoury twist. The match officials discovered that their dressingroom had been burgled. In total, £172 was taken. In a shocking reversal of the usual narrative, the referee had been robbed.
Clare had five weeks to prepare for a Munster final. Nobody gave them a chance in hell.
