Ciarán Murphy: Clare right to remember not everything the winners do is perfect

They say that losing a semi-final is a uniquely exquisite torture. In a knock-out tournament like the All-Ireland championships, this can be a rather spurious claim.

Mayo, during Galway’s three-in-a-row in the 1960s, were often described as the second best team in Ireland, which was surely scant consolation. Mick O’Dwyer went into innumerable Cork dressing rooms over the years to tell his vanquished foes that they were something similar, with surely depreciating levels of effectiveness for each successive year he said it.

At the end of the day, the luck of the draw can mean you’re knocked out by the best team in the business, whether that’s the FA Cup third round, or the final at Wembley. The only thing you can prove at the end is that the team that won it all is the best team in the competition. They beat all comers. After that, the race becomes rather cloudier. But if you’ve lost a semi-final, you’ve probably allowed hope to enter your soul, and that’s the kicker.

[ Kevin McStay: GAA needs to incorporate a specific eye-gouging rule ]

If the hurling semi-finals last week proved anything, it’s that there’s more than one way to lose a semi-final, and some of them are far, far preferable to others. “You might as well lose by 12 points as lose by one″ is the sort of scoreboard analysis of high performance that went out with the CD Walkman. Losing, as Clare did against Kilkenny on Saturday night, by that margin suggests a total systems failure. Players and managers talk about seeking a performance, and Clare failed entirely to bring a performance.

Cork dazzle and befuddle in latest defeat to Kerry

---

When it comes to the 20-minute red card replacement, World Rugby should play it safe

---

Ken Early: FAI’s farcical search for an Ireland manager has an answer staring them in the face

---

The Schemozzle: Cork buck the trend against Kerry with promising start but still come up short

---

Galway manager Henry Shefflin, meanwhile, talked about his frustration in targeting a performance, getting a performance, and still not getting the result. The true disappointment was the arrival of hope in the breast of Galway supporters. Clare had been dealing with hope, with expectation, with excitement, since the Munster final. That day appeared to signal their arrival as All-Ireland contenders.

For Galway, the Leinster final defeat to Kilkenny was such a crushing disappointment that it immediately took them out of the All-Ireland running. The green shoots of encouragement that they could have taken from the previous rounds of the Leinster championship were disregarded.

Hope, it seemed in the conversations I had with Galway fans after the game, only really started to rise for them after the 60th minute when they were still boldly stating their case to the All-Ireland champions Limerick.

One losing team last weekend had been dealing with hope for almost a month, the other had 15 minutes of it. Its cruel extinguishment was pretty painful, but what they carry forward after it was strikingly different.

Galway have had a generation of players deliver them one All-Ireland and another three All-Ireland final defeats in the last decade and it was natural that people presumed many of those players would need to be phased out when Shefflin took on the job.

From the 2015 All-Ireland final, 10 of the 26 named that day are still involved in the squad, and indeed are the centrepieces of the team – but the performances of Pádraic Mannion (29), Daithí Burke (29), Conor Cooney (29), Joseph Cooney (31), David Burke (32) and others suggest that there’s plenty of hurling still left in those legs. They didn’t just survive the Limerick crucible, they thrived in it.

Their displays, and the growing assurance of Jack Grealish, Darren Morrissey, Tom Monaghan and Ronan Glennon means Galway supporters are far more upbeat about the future than they were at midday on Sunday. Nothing in their championship season became them like the leaving of it.

Clare supporters on the other hand will try and sift through the wreckage and see if there’s anything that can be salvaged. They had allowed hope to become expectation, and their reaction to things not going to plan early on was to allow all composure to leave their play. They had not prepared themselves to be ambushed quite so effectively.

[ Darragh Ó Sé: Kerry have to stop the rot - another Dublin defeat would be a catastrophe ]

They will in time be able to see that the year had positives, but there’s an inevitable feeling that great wins secured in a season with no silverware, and a depressing ending, were all for naught.

The truth, for Galway and for Clare, lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. Galway have set themselves a bar that many will expect them to hit when the pressure comes on next year, and Clare have far more reasons to be positive than we saw last Saturday evening.

But we in the GAA fetishise the winners more than in any sport. If they were doing early morning sessions when they won last year, that means we must do them this year.

I spoke to a multi-All-Ireland winning player last year about rumours of discontent in some GAA squad or another, and he told me: “You wouldn’t believe the stories you could tell from any season we won an All-Ireland that would be perfect examples of going off the script. But we win. So it’s all grand.”

Not everything the winners do is right. Not everything you do when you don’t win is wrong. The losers last week, and the losers on Sunday week, would do well to remember that.