It's all over, bar the Shout, for Clare

Locker Room:All that endless sunshine we enjoyed to the point where we were threatened with drought and famine and sunstroke and this weekend we got deluge. On Saturday night it rained biblically in Parnell Park, where the Dubs and Limerick played a challenge, and it poured more modestly but with a sinister wind in Thurles yesterday. The gods are jealous of the game which allows the greats to transcend mere mortality.

That's not to say there weren't plenty of mortals in Semple Stadium yesterday. Mortal players and a few mortal sins.

We looked down at the sideline with 10 minutes to go. Clare were seven points behind and not going to win without divine intervention. Davy Fitz was god-knows-where. Tony Considine took his cap off and ran a hand through his hair and continued moving agitatedly up the sideline in the fashion of managers who have played every card and are now hoping their own perpetual movement might save the day.

It was a funny, jarring sight. We knew Tony first as the good-vibes man in the backroom trio who led Clare to their famous All-Irelands in the 1990s. Between the intensity of Ger Loughnane and Mike Mac there had to be slipped some buffer of geniality and bonhomie. Considine was that.

Colourful and fun, he was the man who sang The Lovely Rose of Clare in the Quinnsworth carpark the night the team got back to Ennis with the cup in September 2005. Later as his career developed as a lively pundit, Tony became a fixture among us in the press box high above the field in Semple Stadium. He had and has a good record with club teams, etc, but we never expected to find him as Clare manager much less to see him in a rugged stand-off with the most high-profile goalkeeper in the country.

The rights and wrongs of Davy Fitz's banishment aren't for discussion on a morning like this. Suffice to say that from Tony Considine's point of view perhaps he felt a new broom had to sweep all corners and even Davy Fitz's well-advertised and conspicuous love of county and love of the number-one jersey wasn't going to save him.

It has to have been a tough decision. Davy is a strong personality. He is connected. He himself is successful in coaching. If you had been the genial buffer between Loughnane and Mike Mac and were seeking to establish yourself as the coach in a county most noted in recent years for its internecine squabbling, would you want to be proving yourself to Davy Fitz every time you spoke? Who knows?

What's for certain is that the goalkeeping saga has consumed a huge amount of energy in Clare. It certain too that Phillip Brennan's occupancy of the number-one jersey yesterday did Clare no harm at all.

Cork scored one goal, created from a neat handpass into Pa Cronin which unstitched the Clare full-back line. When Clare begin their annual tribunal of inquiry this week into what went wrong they should perhaps look further than the Davy Fitz issue.

Clare are a great story for the second half of the last decade. Their manager brought an elemental spirit to the game. Their players claimed citizenship in part of the hurling nation where we never imagined Claremen could be equals.

They created a lore about themselves which still fascinates and even now every team loitering on the cusp of the big time must look back to the famous league final defeat Clare suffered to Kilkenny and quote Loughnane saying in the immediate aftermath of what looked like a hammering that his team would win the Munster championship.

Who among us didn't check the skies that night to see if there wasn't a full moon?

It's all gone though. Clare enjoyed the success but never managed it. In a county where there is a great and momentous breakthrough one always expects there to be a following wind of young players who have been inspired and driven by what they have seen on the television on September Sundays and in the towns the following week as the cup is paraded and serenaded. Clare couldn't have been more inspirational. Anthony Daly was the sort of captain a novelist would have drawn up.

"We're no longer the whipping boys!" quoth Anthony in one of his famous orations. And Brian Lohan, the red helmet and the clearances off the back foot, and Jamesie O'Connor quick as a fish carrying a whole forward line alone at times. And Seánie McMahon. That Munster final? That broken collarbone?

Listen. Clare had enough inspirational moments, enough turbulent and inspirational seasons, to have filled the imaginations of two generations of hurlers.

And yet 12 years after the breakthrough where are the boys who were in mini-leagues back in 1995, the kids who were 10 or filling out the under-12 teams?

Back then Tony Considine was doing his bit. It was for the county board to be reaping the wind.

It didn't happen. Back then we had the Clare Shout and a rush on enthusiasm for Clare hurling, which was so exuberant and occasionally arrogant that it turned neutrals and bluebloods against the Banner in the space of a few seasons. And they thrived on that just as they had thrived on being outsiders.

Yesterday in Thurles we had a small and quiet band of Clare hurling fans who had bothered to make the trip. We couldn't hear much shouting. Their theme might have been the old standard Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home.

Success is hard to handle. Failure hurts more but its lessons are obvious and it refuses to nourish complacency. We speak often in the GAA about helping weaker counties but there is a case too for centrally devising and implementing structures to help counties making the breakthrough.

Clare didn't help themselves but in the future when the next Clare come along they should be flooded with development offices and blueprints for development squads and courses for club coaches.

In Clare a messianic figure hauled the county to the mountain top a dozen years ago now. Now they are down the hill again and it would take a brave man to undertake the task of carrying them up the gradient.

Tony Considine at least put his head on the block. He must have known, he did know, when he took over that the county had not done enough work at underage level to move seamlessly from the twilight of the great team into the dawn of another memorable side. Tony Considine will lead Clare through the dark times which must follow neglect. His thanks for doing so will be minimal.

Clare were beaten by seven points yesterday but Cork hardly raised a gallop. Clare will go off into the qualifiers, where the big day out will be the tussle with Loughnane's Galway. In Clare they don't have Loughnane to kick around anymore. If Considine's team lose to Galway that won't matter; he'll take the kicking. Eaten bread is soon forgotten. Structures and planning are dull things to be talking about when there is a juicy controversy like the Davy Fitz banishment to be arguing over.

It was sad to see the old gulf between Clare and Cork opening up again like a fissure yesterday. It's sad to see Offaly consigned to second-division hurling next year. Success is tricky and is often unsustainable for counties not used to it.

Instead of kicking Tony Considine, Clare need to devise a five-year plan and hope they can implement it now the good times are all gone.