Blue bloods in red restore order in hurling's empire

Clare and Wexford may come and go but the Big Three are never far away in the hard realm that is championship hurling, writes Tom Humphries.

SOMETIMES THE embers of empire look like the lingering flame of revolution.

Ten years ago in Semple Stadium as Cork and Clare played out the closing stages of their Munster semi-final, Ger Loughnane - who had been cleared by the authorities to take his place on the sideline - strolled down the length of the pitch on the old stand side, and as he did so, his people, still worshipful then, rose to acclaim him.

His team had never been more persuasive, his status never more unimpeachable. Clare, the All-Ireland champions, were dismissing Cork, the young league champions. Swatting them away like wanton boys. Loughnane pretended not to even notice the ovation. That made them applaud all the more fiercely.

Ten years ago? It was as fine a performance as Clare gave in their pomp. All the hallmarks of Loughnane's mastery were on view. A last-minute reprieve to walk the sideline, a dummy team named to irk the media and fox the opposition and a month previously his horses seemingly hobbled as they stumbled to a league semi-final defeat to Cork by 11 points. Nobody took that one seriously as anything but more Loughnane fun and games.

Michael O'Halloran was named in the team on Tuesday night and told on Sunday that along with Conor Clancy he wouldn't play. He gave a speech beforehand which contributed as much as any performance might have.

Since winning their second All-Ireland in three years the previous September, Clare had idled through the winter and spring, Loughnane holding his peace till the evenings grew longer and a game presented itself that he knew would mean something. Cork meant something.

"I'm so fresh myself," he said afterwards, "and have such a hunger that it's like in 95 except I have more confidence and am more anxious to win than ever."

Ten years on and all is changed utterly. Last Sunday in Semple Stadium Loughnane could scarcely attract a pat on the back as his Galway revolution spluttered and failed. This time it was Cork who were the old soldiers, the gnarled veterans.

In the second half they found the power to do unto a Loughnane team exactly what was done unto them in their youth.

They came away feeling refreshed, renewed and reunited. Tomorrow they get the chance to road test their sense of well-being. They play Clare. A young Clare side which has felt its own strength a couple of times this season. Are Cork stirring the embers or is Jimmy Barry-Murphy's revolution, started all those years ago with his minor tenure, still burning brightly?

That summer of 1998 was a turning point. It saw the arrival in real terms of Waterford, who under Gerald McCarthy contested the league and Munster finals, and it climaxed in the grotesque, bizarre, unprecedented and unusual Clare-versus-Offaly semi-final series.

Between times there was every sort of drama and sensation. It was the summer of Colin Lynch and Colin Lynch's granny, a summer when Loughnane seemed drawn to controversy as irresistibly as a moth to light.

Anybody who saw Clare that day in Semple Stadium, biffing Cork out of the championship, as wound up and focused as only Clare could be, would find it hard to believe that by the end of the summer the All-Ireland final would take place without them.

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

Clare were in their pomp, seemingly able to turn the power on and off. Drama and perhaps hubris would derail them but all that drama was to come later. On the day they were unanswerable.

If Clare had sleep-walked through the league reaching a semi-final on residual fitness and habit, Cork had used it to copperfasten a sense of possibility which had arisen out of the previous year's defeat to Clare, when a mere four points had separated the sides. Clare had powered on to an All-Ireland; Jimmy Barry-Murphy had gone back to the drawing board.

Through that winter's league Cork played virtually the same side, tinkering only at wing forward. They wound up with the league title and a palpable sense of progress. They went to Semple Stadium that day in June without having been beaten all year.

They struggled back then to find physically imposing forwards apart from Alan Browne. They had converted Fergal McCormack from a defender to a centre forward with good results and he would win an All-Ireland there the following year.

Seán O'Farrell had broken into the attack having broken an ankle late the previous year. His reputation grew exponentially as the season grew, and free-scoring performances against Waterford in the league final and Limerick in the Munster first-round game suggested an enduring talent.

O'Farrell was one of five starters that day still eligible at under-21 that year.

Indeed the following week Cork's under-21s would dismantle their Clare counterparts as they moved inexorably toward a second All-Ireland. The team included Donal Óg Cusack, Diarmuid O'Sullivan, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, Mickey O'Connell, Ben O'Connor, Timmy McCarthy, Joe Deane and O'Farrell. It was the final game between the sticks for the great Ger Cunningham.

Clare didn't score a goal that day, a failing which meant James Moran of Limerick was the last man to put a championship goal past Cunningham, having done so late in the game the previous month at the Gaelic Grounds.

Cunningham had to pick the sliotar out of the net three times that afternoon against Limerick and he took some criticism afterwards, the slyer end of which suggested his long friendship with St Finbarr's team-mate Barry-Murphy was keeping him in the team.

If Cork could draw satisfaction from their defeat to Clare it was that Cunningham went out with a clean sheet and reputation restored. His last significant act in a Cork jersey was a fine save from a Niall Gilligan shot.

By the following season Donal Óg would have taken over.

Cork's problems were at the other end. Against a back six of such legendary physical prowess as Clare possessed they pitched their two big men, Browne and McCormack, and hoped speed and guile would do the rest.

Seánie McGrath had troubled Anthony Daly the previous summer for five points but apart from two brief patches of liberty in the second half, both of which brought him points, he struggled to get free this time around.

Liam Doyle smothered Kieran Morrison in that stern and unfussy way Doyle had. Seán O'Farrell had to be hauled off in the second half while still scoreless under the watch of Brian Quinn.

Browne started well on Brian Lohan but fell under the spell of the famous red helmet. Cork's forwards finished the day with four points from play.

Clare, a side not known or regarded for the range of their forward play, ran in 21 points, including 16 from play.

The total included contributions from each starting forward plus Ger O'Loughlin, who came in as a sub.

Cork's half-back line - the platform for all that would follow - was but a pale shadow of the Doyle, McMahon, Daly half-back line Clare celebrated. Mick Daly had to be switched back from midfield in a swap with Seán Óg to patch things up as Jamesie O'Connor, in particular, ran riot. Jamesie finished the day with five points from play.

Afterwards Loughnane, with a growing sense of ebullience, defended his selection policy as a means of protecting younger players. The media were umbraged and would continue to be so for much of the summer as Loughnane took to giving state-of-the-nation addresses on Clare FM as the controversies stacked up all around.

We look back on that crazy summer now as the end of an era. Offaly put the last punctuation mark to the lyric song of that era, picking up the All-Ireland when all the dust had settled. Offaly (2), Clare (2), and Wexford had shared the previous five titles between them.

Now the blue bloods reasserted themselves. The following September's All-Ireland final would be between Cork and Kilkenny, and including the brief uprising of Nicky English's Tipperary side, hurling has been restored as the game of the big three in the years since then.

Clare slipped away with nothing put by for the rainy days that would follow. Offaly and Wexford followed mainly the same plot.

Ten years on we yearn for the novelty and colour of that summer and those times. This summer seems to be narrowing itself all the time to another contest between two of the big three contenders. Loughnane looked a spent hurricane last weekend.

Where's the romance in a time of empire?