Clare cream rises to the top

The cream hasn't been invented to leave a cat as satisfied as Ger Loughnane was in the dressing-room in Thurles yesterday. The sight of the young pretenders from Cork in full flight, their ambitions in the wind for another year.

"We were never better prepared and the hunger was never greater than against this emerging Cork team," said Loughnane. "There's a freshness there and freshness brings hunger. We've played no important match since last September [All-Ireland final], no match that we were geared up for.

"The spirit in these players is fantastic. Even the fellas who weren't playing - Michael O'Halloran gave a speech before the team went out and that shows the spirit.

"The core players, however they do it, can get themselves right for the championship. I'm so fresh myself and have such a hunger that it's like in '95 except I've more confidence and more anxious to win than ever before."

Questions arose about the selection policy which named a team with two false entries. Michael O'Halloran and Conor Clancy had been included in the original selection but yesterday morning were disabused of the notion.

"The team was picked on Tuesday night and we told the players that the team which appeared in the newspapers, to pay it no heed, that we'd tell them on Sunday morning. That was the team that was picked last Saturday. You can take it that the team we publish the next day will be the team that will play.

"I'm always saying this. When you have young players, new players, you must protect them. If we'd picked them on Tuesday, all of you fellas would have been down interviewing them. Like what happened to Danny Scanlan before the League semi-final, it ruined him.

"They appeared out of nowhere and played great and you can interview them away before the Munster final because they have a good game behind them. That's the way I think young players should be handled. You may think differently."

Seven weeks previously, Clare had been hammered out the gate by Cork in the NHL semi-final. Yesterday couldn't have been more different.

"We played in such a way to disrupt the Cork backs," according to Loughnane. "We didn't play in straight lines like in the League semi-final. We played a different way altogether. Twenty one was a good final score in a Munster championship match."

In three weeks, Clare will defend their title against Munster's other newcomers, Waterford. Mindful of the fact, Loughnane slipped into the appropriate mode. "We always reckoned that Waterford would be a much bigger danger to us than Cork. I thought the Limerick-Cork game was a very poor game played at a very slow pace. In the League final, Waterford [who were beaten by Cork] played it at a great pace and they'll have far more pace than those Cork forwards in the Munster final. It will be a bigger battle than today."

For Jimmy Barry-Murphy, the season had ended with a bit of a thud. It's been a year of progress but the comprehensiveness of the defeat will have given unpalatable food for thought. "I think we were on top of them in the first 20 minutes," said Barry-Murphy, "got opportunities and didn't take them. We learnt a hard lesson at this level: if you don't take your scores when they pop up, it'll come against you. I thought we had them in trouble in the first 20 minutes but we didn't get any return from the possession to the full forward line.

"They'd a point to prove. I knew they'd be a different team than in the League semifinal. We were struggling in too many positions, trying to plug too many gaps."