Underdog tag lost, Clare are now top dogs

An inter-county hurling manager phoned during the week to express regret that so much of the coverage of last week's Guinness All-Ireland final had been, if not negative, at best distracted from what had been a thrilling conclusion to a great season.

The point was valid, even if a quick trawl through Tuesday's newspapers would have indicated a slight exaggeration. Some of the gloss on Clare's historic victory had been scuffed - albeit no more than that - by a couple of flaring controversies that had arisen in the aftermath.

Most significant among these was the row on The Sunday Game between Clare's manager Ger Loughnane and Eamonn Cregan, match analyst for RTE and The Irish Times. Loughnane described Cregan's analysis of the final on television as "whingeing". Cregan was visibly taken aback, but defended his point of view.

Later during the week and also yesterday, he made it clear that he was anxious to avoid perpetuating the feud. "I've really nothing to add. Ger said his piece and I said mine. As far as I'm concerned, the matter is buried and the important thing now is for the people of Clare to enjoy their All-Ireland win," he said.

"I was asked by the programme to analyse the match from a Tipperary perspective and Tomas Mulcahy was asked to take the Clare angle. I did what I was asked. I've had messages of support from people in a number of counties and as I said, regard the whole thing as closed."

In the Clare hotel, murmurs of discontent had been heard during Cregan's comments about the quality of the match and by the time he came on air, Loughnane had determined that he should respond to the perceived slight on his team and county.

One of the problems with The Sunday Game on All-Ireland night is that in its coverage of the teams' hotels, the concentration on the winners' banquet tends to make the programme part of the celebrations - which can distort the distance appropriate to an analysis programme.

In other words, what plays well as objective summary may not always please a room full of jubilant players, officials and supporters. What struck most viewers as reasonable commentary obviously came across as truculent and begrudging in the Clare hotel.

One important but apparently trivial element of proceedings may have been that Loughnane did not read any newspapers until the early hours of Tuesday morning. By his own admission, he would have tempered or abandoned his comments had he had the opportunity to read Cregan's column in this paper on Monday morning - a warm endorsement of the Clare team, contributed four hours before he went on television.

Loughnane has also stepped back from personal comments made about Cregan's job in Tipperary (he is manager of the Nenagh branch of the Irish Nationwide Building Society) - both in the Limerick Leader a couple of days ago and in private, describing his earlier comments as "out of order".

Interventions by the manager have been a constant feature of the remarkable season enjoyed by Clare. Public controversy has attended a few of these but Loughnane has defended his actions as being designed to take pressure of his team.

To be fair, this was partly justified by a series of comments made about captain Anthony Daly's speech after the Munster final defeat of last week's opponents, Tipperary.

Daly's statement that Clare were "no longer the whipping boys of Munster" was taken badly by some Tipperary supporters, but the impact was exacerbated when Wexford captain Rod Guiney rather more raucously visited the same theme a week later, after the Leinster final win over Kilkenny.

The frequent recycling of the 1993 Munster final (when Tipperary humiliated Clare) as a motivation also caused irritation in Tipperary, but through a series of gracious remarks after the All-Ireland, Loughnane signalled that he and the county were now resting easy in the afterglow of a season which has uniquely allowed them to defeat their erstwhile tormentors twice in the one championship.

It did appear, however, from comments to a Tipperary crowd made by the Archbishop of Cashel, Dr Dermot Clifford, patron of the GAA, to the effect that Clare having been gracious losers in the past would learn in time to be gracious winners, that the closing of the book on recent rivalries may have been unilateral on Loughnane's part.

Both Loughnane and his Tipperary counterpart Len Gaynor were joined in another controversy, that of the dugout confinements. Loughnane's arose after he had encroached on the pitch several times during the All-Ireland semi-final against Kilkenny.

Gaynor's arose in what were widely regarded as suspicious circumstances. Imposed only three days before the All-Ireland final, Gaynor's punishment related to incidents during a far lower-key National League semi-final against Galway in Ennis.

Aside from the stealth of its imposition, this punishment was seen as merely an equalising of the scores between Tipperary and Clare by a Games Administration Committee reluctant to stack the deck so significantly against Clare by confining the county's manager to his dugout.

The match started against an absurd backdrop of benches placed between the dugouts and sideline to facilitate both managers in viewing the match and communicating with players. In fact neither paid the sanction a blind bit of notice and ran proceedings much as they ordinarily would.

Loughnane maintains that the issue was too important for him to be deflected by what he plainly saw as a vexatious disciplinary measure. However the GAC take to this flouting of their authority, they would be as well to revise this form of punishment.

Either the practice of touchline coaching should be permitted and the consequences tolerated or else it should be banned and the sanction enforced by expelling managers behind the wire to the stand.

To an extent Clare attract magnified controversy because they are now indisputably the best team in the game. The methods by which they have attained this eminence have come under scrutiny.

Intense fitness levels, Loughnane's formidable powers of motivation, tactical sleight-of-hand, discipline (requiring, amongst other things, Fergal Hegarty to maintain the front that he would play in the final despite the already-taken decision that Niall Gilligan would start instead of him) and the less frequently remarked-on improvement in the team's hurling technique have all left the team on a pedestal, the target for aspiring successors.

Last week's success was in many ways more satisfying than the All-Ireland of two years ago. This can be explained in two ways.

In 1995, the county genuinely celebrated its first Munster title since 1932 more wildly than the All-Ireland which followed - for the simple reason that the distance travelled between the team's beginnings and a provincial title was much greater than the distance between that title and an All-Ireland.

Secondly, a team that sets its sights on an All-Ireland - which Clare did this year - will derive greater satisfaction from winning it than a team for which the whole campaign had been a bit of a surprise, as in '95.

Back in that year, after the final, Offaly's Johnny Pilkington arrived in the Clare hotel late at night and in an, umm, emotional address, urged them in their confrontations with Tipperary and Cork to "keep the f*****s down". Loughnane repeated the story in the Kerry dressing-room after a shock NHL defeat in Tralee.

Now, nearly two years later, Clare are no longer the happy fellas who bucked the system. They are the system.