Banner boy's lead role

Ballinakill, close to the east Galway border, was where it began. A neighbour, Michael Rourke, showed the three O'Connor youngsters a hurl and how to hit a ball out on their front lawn.

It was then that Jamesie began taking ambitious swipes at the sliotar and found he had grace and courage enough to ghost past Christy and John before flicking a point over the rose bush. He was caught up in the rhythm of the game even as a kid, wandering along to underage training with Tommie Larkins and compensating with balance and dexterity for what he lacked in bulk.

Then, when he was 10 the family moved slightly south to his mother's country and Jamesie O'Connor was enrolled in St Flannan's College in Ennis, fabled as a nursery for young hurlers. Even if Clare seniors were hypnotised by their own uncertainty and grim history at that time, Flannan's was about winning.

O'Connor struggled for breath initially, size weighing against him a little. But by the age of 16, he had progressed sufficiently to make the county under-16 team. Minor honours followed; he played centre forward on a side that fell to Cork in the Munster final of 1990.

At Flannan's, he watched Anthony Daly lift an All-Ireland for the school while he was in second year. He lined out for the school team that lost out in two successive All-Ireland finals.

UCG beckoned after the Leaving. By the time he was finishing up, studying for the Teaching Diploma, the college had forged a good side, disappointing themselves by stumbling against a fine Limerick team in Fitzgibbon Cup quarterfinals after an electric tie which sparked well into extra-time.

Consistent and exciting, Len Gaynor drafted him into the Clare senior panel in 1994 and he has hardly missed training since.

Of all the moments of rapture he has known in recent times, all the wins and celebrations, the memory of the 1995 Munster final win over Limerick still burns most fiercely. Because, he feels, they had to win, after losing the previous two.

Only in retrospect did he fully grasp that Ger Loughnane had shaped a team in his image. The pressure now is of a different type of intensity. O'Connor and his team-mates pay little heed to the tag of favourites and are nonplussed by the public assertion that Offaly will offer them pale resistance.

O'Connor knows Offaly as having experience and a daunting back six who will do much to dam the narrow avenues of Croke Park. Offaly also seem to have a little of their old spirit back, recently talking up a perceived slight during the League this year as though it were a mortal insult.

From O'Connor's perspective, the Clare team were about to leave the dressing-room for the Easter Saturday throw-in when they were informed of a delay due to late crowd arrivals. They simply sat on. To assert that they were deliberately nettling Offaly is, he believes, ludicrous.

After the recriminations of the Munster final replay, after the whole bitter fall-out, James O'Connor just wants to hurl again. To get a difficult, unknowable sort of semi-final behind him.

Reckons if he was an Offaly man now, he could afford to sneak the odd smile. All the expectation lies with the Banner. But that makes little odds to him. His team may not know everything but they can say for sure that winning beats losing.