After the 2020 championship, Brian Lohan’s first as Clare manager, every player met the management for an individual debrief. –
Just before John Conlon’s meeting ended one of the Clare selectors asked him if he could play anywhere else on the field. The question seemed to him like a floating afterthought; Conlon was turning 32, heading into his 13th season on the panel, a pillar of the Clare attack, Lohan’s first captain, an All Star full forward. Nothing important was hidden.
For full disclosure Conlon told them that he had done a stint at centre back for his club Clonlara once, and another tour of duty at centrefield, but not for long.
Because of the pandemic Clare didn’t resume collective training for another five months. Thinking filled the vacuum and the seed of Conlon’s answer was fertilised by other thoughts.
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The players were warming up for a practice match in training when one of the selectors sidled over to Conlon, like a tout offering him a ticket; they wanted to try him at number six. By nature Conlon has an open mind. His cousins, he says, tease him about his relentlessly positive attitude.
“‘Sure you think you can beat anyone,’ they’d be saying to me. But that’s the way I would always have been brought up. You’re better off being positive – if you’re being negative it’s only going to end one way.”
In the GAA, the league is used primarily for research and development, and many innovations never make it to the marketplace. For all parties it was a managed risk, like something your pension adviser would suggest. Conlon embraced it.
“For my career,” he says now, “it was massive. It was a new lease of life. I had to learn a completely new position. I had to go off and really change my game.”
During the lockdown Conlon had spent hours in the field in Clonlara with 30 sliotars, practising his shooting. All of that homework was ripped up. In the modern game the centre back must be a playmaker, so in his solitary practice he devised new routines, lining up poles as targets to hone his middle-distance passing.
On Friday night in the RDS, Conlon accepted the All Star for centre back, less than 30 months after he debuted in the role in a National League loss against Antrim in Belfast. In more than 50 years of the scheme, only three other hurlers had won awards in defence and attack: Brian Corcoran, Brian Whelahan and Ken McGrath. He had joined exalted company.
The way the championship runs now, though, nobody has a stainless season, not even All Stars. There are too many games and too much jeopardy. Conlon was man of the match on the night Clare beat Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds, sending the All-Ireland champions to their first championship defeat in four years. But a few weeks later the teams met again in the Munster final, and in the second half Limerick cut Conlon adrift in an ocean of space.
“We had a new full back in that day [Cian Dillon], which was a big thing. So you’re obviously trying to protect that a bit more. You’re trying to fill those spaces and read it as best you can, but when there’s a load of space in front of you it can be hard to gauge it and understand what to do. Like, you’re trying to protect and you’re trying to attack. It’s a hard position. It’s a really hard position.”
He mastered it.
***
An hour after the Clare county final, a month ago, Conlon was the last Clonlara player to leave the field. He was the only survivor from the team that had last won the title, 15 years before. The neighbourhood paparazzi surrounded him in a flash mob, brandishing their phones.
A year earlier Clonlara had won the senior B title in Clare, a kind of mezzanine competition for teams that don’t make the knock-out rounds, but are safe from relegation. Winning it for the third time in a row tasted like a lager shandy, not one thing or the other.
“After year two,” says Conlon, “you’re kind of getting a bit annoyed about it.”
In the dressingroom after the third win Conlon spiked the celebrations and challenged everyone to raise their sights. Within two weeks they were back in the gym; training went from three sessions a week to four; they engaged a nutritionist and a sports psychologist.
“Everything,” he says, “went through the roof”.
Conlon had experienced every shade of club life. His senior debut was in a relegation playoff, pitched in as a 16-year-old. He was very young to be exposed to a game of such importance but Clonlara were already staking their future on a talented wave of teenagers.
Over the previous 15 or 20 years the club had undergone a transformation. The pitch used to be in a field that locals described as a cabbage haggard, right alongside where Conlon grew up. When he was very young he remembers cows rambling through the dressingrooms one day, uninhibited and unchecked.
Over time, everything changed. The club relocated to the middle of the village and developed a terrific complex from scratch: two sand-based pitches, an AstroTurf pitch, a gym. In the dressingroom their ambition climbed and didn’t drop below a certain altitude.
“Since we won in 2008 people say we underachieved, and we probably did underachieve in terms of not winning trophies. But for a club that wouldn’t have a tradition we were still getting to semi-finals and finals for nearly 10 years in a row.”
Conlon kept going. Over the years his stamina and his desire have been extraordinary. In search of marginal gains he was prepared to try anything. Early in his career he enrolled for sports yoga courses, and through that gateway he was introduced to Bikram yoga. To make room for it in his day he started getting up an hour earlier. Among hurlers, it wasn’t common practice.
When Clare brought in a nutritionist in 2018 Conlon changed his eating habits, radically. He was always conscientious about his diet, but in matches he often felt bloated and he couldn’t understand why.
The nutritionist suggested that they carry out tests on his digestion and in the backwash Conlon cut out red meat, bread, milk, peppers, tomatoes, stuff that he loved. He even blended his food for a while as a digestive aid.
“I got a lot of slagging for the blending, but that only happened for one summer. I was just paranoid off my head I’d say. I don’t do that any more, the blending. I like red meat and steaks and all that kind of stuff, but if I was leading up a match, or in the middle of a training period, I wouldn’t be eating them. I’d be very much chicken, turkey, fish.
“I’d be disciplined enough. I’d be very disciplined in fairness. But I wouldn’t be afraid to let go either. I’ve learned a lot more about being able to enjoy life. I think that comes with age. Things that would have consumed and annoyed me years ago, I find it very easy to let them go now.”
Serious injuries came late in his career. Just before the first Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020 Conlon ruptured the cruciate ligament in his knee. For the long recovery he transformed his garage into a gym, painted the walls, installed a TV and made himself at home. He researched the injury and “loads of things about my body” and by blunt force of will he turned a torment into something positive.
“I was working on all my weaknesses and getting all my niggles sorted out. Before I got injured I could barely do any long running, my back was killing me, I could barely sit down. I got all of that sorted. I wouldn’t be able to play as much as I can now only for that injury.”
Other setbacks came to test him. In the autumn of 2021 he injured the same knee training with Clonlara. Keyhole surgery corrected the problem, but the rehab descended on him like a fog.
“I was out for 12 weeks and I remember being in the gym out in the garage, lying on the bench and looking up at the ceiling for an hour and thinking, ‘Jesus, is this all worth it?’ When you get injuries like that there’s always these moments. But then, you get up and get going. I’d be strong-minded that way. You’d be saying, ‘This is not going to be the way I’m going to end.’”
For Clonlara it has been a golden autumn. A week after the hurlers won the county final their sister camogie club, Truagh-Clonlara, won their first senior title. Conlon’s wife, Michele Caulfield, was the joint captain; Conlon helped to train the team. For a while he was in the field six nights a week. In his element.
On Sunday, the hurlers will play Tipperary champions Kiladangan in the Munster semi-final. The last time Clonlara emerged from Clare they had no mind for a provincial campaign, and Sarsfields from Cork annihilated them by 16 points. Never again.
“We’d won in Clare for the first time in nearly 90 years and there were some lads still drinking I’d say right up to the [Sars] match. As a club we’ve been trying to get back there and not let ourselves down like we did last time. But isn’t it a great thing that a club like Clonlara can be going to Thurles – dreaming and optimistic and seeing a massive opportunity?”
It is the only way he would see it.
