Lyons out of the shadows as Clare find their second wind

Cyril Lyons interview: Ian O'Riordan finds that the Clare manager was rewarded for his patience in his handling of the post-Loughnane era

Two Years after Cyril Lyons took over the most high-profile position in hurling, he finally steps into the light. Clare's return to the All-Ireland final has truly freed him from the shadow of Ger Loughnane and now he's talking about his own season and his own players.

Lyons was bred on the same religion as Loughnane but preaches differently. A teacher in Ruan National School, a small parish outside Ennis, he has much in common with his predecessor but there are many differences too. His reserved, seemingly shy manner certainly couldn't be more contrasting.

On the night when Loughnane stepped down following Clare's Munster semi-final loss to Tipperary, Lyons was told two hours beforehand he was the likely successor. He sometimes laughs about that night and reckons if he was as wise then as he is now, he might have thought twice. "It was an awesome job to fill, sure. But being manager is a difficult job anywhere. I suppose when you're taking over from someone as big as Ger, it isn't easy, particularly as the team had gone so hard for four or five years. Like any team, there is a risk that they can't keep it up."

In Ruan, where Lyons was born, there has long been the same fervour for hurling that fired Loughnane. Ruan provided one of the original giants of Clare hurling in Jimmy Smyth, the man who played in a record five successive Clare minor teams, but won nothing with the senior team in the 1950s except respect.

Lyons followed Smyth to St Flannan's College and tasted his first hurling success when winning the All-Ireland colleges' title of 1976. He played senior alongside Loughnane and was still in the frame at the age of 35 when Loughnane delivered Clare its All-Ireland title in 1995, coming on a substitute in the final win over Offaly.

In the year before Loughnane moved on, Lyons served as a selector. "I suppose Ger asked Louis Mulqueen and I to get involved in the hope that maybe we would take over after him. I know I went in on the understanding that I'd be a selector for the year, and there were no conditions attached. Things happened then that I had no control over, and I ended up being manager."

It wasn't an easy transition. Outsiders were suggesting Clare's well was running dry, and Lyons would have trouble keeping the backbone of the team together.

"You will always be concerned about things like that," he says. "A lot of these lads had lost Munster finals back in 1993 and 1994. The Waterford game last month was their fifth All-Ireland semi-final. That's a fair lot to have done in a short time.

"We didn't get the second chance last year and we really suffered. People don't realise how much we suffered. We felt we were so close, and then Tipperary, to their credit, went on to do so well afterwards. I know Clare people were thinking if we had that chance and won that match we could have been successful. There's no guarantee we would, have, but that day in Páirc Uí Chaoimh was a cruel way to lose."

A year on and he's still never had to question the commitment of his players. Though the loss to Tipperary was hard to stomach, they looked at the qualifiers and said if this was last year, wouldn't they have been delighted with it.

"What I have to say, though, is that the matches fell well for us. That's no disrespect to any of the teams we played. But we beat Dublin well. We beat Wexford well, apart from 10 minutes in the second half. And in the quarter-final we got the real serious challenge that we needed against Galway. And that did wonders for us."

But Lyons never saw this year particularly as make or break. He sees every year like that. If a team doesn't do well in any year, you'll always have players that will think about opting out, and he reckons there were matches this year that if they'd lost would have had players thinking that way.

"I think it's what happens in the season that counts most, not what happened four or five years ago. Those games against Galway and Waterford have brought us on mentally, and hurling wise, because they were serious tests. The progress that we've made there will count most in the final against Kilkenny."