Paidi O Se, the Kerry manager sounded as if he felt sorry for Clare's defeat when addressing the vanquished in their dressingroom after the match.

"Hang in there," was his advice to them. "The scoreline does not bear any resemblance to your football performance. You are a young team and you will get your reward."

O Se regarded his team's first goal as "lucky". He added: "That goal before halftime gave us a great break and with a couple of frees that could have been converted it would have been much closer at the interval instead of the 1-7 to 0-4 scoreline."

He went on: "I want ye to know that we trained harder for today's game than we did for the semi-final against Cork because we knew that ye would be up for it. "We trained that hard out of respect for ye," he added.

Joe Considine, the Clare midfielder, said: "I am not feeling too good after that. We expected to do better. The first goal was a real killer. Kerry were a class apart today. We just could not live with them."

Considine went on: "The second-half ball was coming in quickly and we missed tackles the longer the game went on."

On the question of fitness, Considine said: "We were fit but when games are going against you, you cannot be fit enough." He added: "We put in 120 training sessions since last September. It was just a case of Kerry playing a gear or two above us today." He added: "Yes, I thought we had a claim for a penalty in the first half when Martin Daly was fouled, but the first goal was the real killer."

Irish rugby forward Mick Galwey stood outside the Kerry dressing-room bearing a large smile. He said: "They put a lot of work into it but it is going to be tough against Armagh. We will just have to wait and see."

The Clare manager, Tommy Curtin, said: "They gave it their all but it was not good enough on the day. I was surprised by the score but greater accuracy on our part, especially with frees, and not getting a penalty when I think we deserved one puts a meaner look on the scoreboard."

Curtin added: "The teams were evenly balanced up to the time of that first goal but we fell away. I do not lose hope in this team because of this result. We don't have that many top-class players to make substitutions in a match of this kind but in Division One next year I expect to see us make a big impact," he said.