Keith Duggan talks to Clare full back Brian Lohan, whose status as one of the greatest defenders of all time has been firmly established

Brian Lohan scrunches his face into a bothered grimace. He knits his brow and lifts his tea cup and replaces it again. Words. He has limited patience for them but endless respect. Opponents he can track down, or at least die trying. Words are trickier. Once he lets them free, they are full of ungovernable energy and mischief and potential trouble.

So when on ground that makes him edgy, he selects his words precisely if not always lovingly, sometimes pausing in mid-sentence to consider his next move, cautious as a Russian chess master of old.

He is explaining here about what it is he does, about what sets him apart. Brian Lohan is talking about being a full back.

"Yeah, ah, I don't . . . I just go out and play. If a fella went out the field on me, ah, I'd let him off. I'd let him off."

Pause.

"But then if he is doin' damage outside, you'd say, 'what am I gonna do now'."

Pause. Sigh.

"Ah no, generally, I would tend to stay inside, to stay close."

Pause.

"Ah, I suppose I don't really want to talk about it."

It was Ger Loughnane who assured him, providentially, that he was going to be a full back for Clare. This was in his first season, the whipping days of 1993.

"Daly (Anthony) was in at full that year, clearing all round him. I was only new and in at corner back. Loughnane pulled me aside near the end of the year and told me I would be at full the next year and McMahon would be outside me at centre half. And I just nodded. I didn't even know who McMahon was."

These days, Anthony Daly, the great orator and wing back during Clare's first burst to glory, is selling replicas of the jersey he wore in those seasons in his sports shop in Ennis. He remembers the elder Lohan in his first season, respectful and watchful.

"Average", as Loughnane termed him then.

"A quiet fella, shy enough. We had him in at corner back and you know, he was a good young hurler. But ordinary enough," Daly recalls. "We certainly had no idea what he was going to become. In retrospect, Brian Lohan would have made it in any sport. Soccer, rugby whatever. I am certain of that.

"Because he has this unnatural determination. Like, his brother Frank came in and you could see he was a more gifted sportsman, generally speaking. Frank was a more laid-back guy, which isn't a criticism of Frank. Like, Frank had bucket loads of determination, it was just in comparison to yer man, he paled. Sure we all did."

The notion of full back appealed to Lohan then. Despite being relatively callow, the position held no foreboding for him.

"No. I was anxious to . . . I was anxious to go in."

Anxious. Somehow, it is a word that fits well on him. Brian Lohan grew up around the urban centre of Shannon. He speaks eloquently about the evolution of the town, spawned from the advance factories constructed under Seán Lemass in the 1950s.

Gus Lohan was a Galway man stationed as a garda in Newmarket-on-Fergus but moved around 1970.

"When I was born, my mother went into hospital from Newmarket-on-Fergus but came home to Shannon. So I always lived there."

Hurling lends itself beautifully to the mossy, mythical past and venerable tradition. Put it down to his singular and maybe slightly obtuse nature, but Brian Lohan did it differently. Shannon was no Cloyne. It was a shiny, cosmopolitan town where even the history was made from formica. He watched his father hurl with Clare in the 1970s and hurled himself and, like any kid, tried whatever was going.

"It was a good place to grow up. Whatever was on the TV, we would play it. Soccer. Tennis."

And as a teenager, he never quite made the grade. He got passed over at minor level for Clare, narrowly but enough to leave a deep impression. With Wolfe Tones, his formative years were full of tough lessons.

"Teams I was on would have lost an awful lot. We got beaten in an under-12 final, we got beaten in an under-14 final, we lost an under-15 final. And then eventually, we won an under-16 final. We were the first to win that. And we won a minor final, we were the first to win a minor, first to win under-21. So having lost that bit when we were younger, I think we were always that little bit hungrier. There were about 10 or 12 of us and when it got serious, we started winning."

Brian Lohan reckons whatever obstinacy or spirit is in him dates back to those precious, local defeats of his adolescence. It didn't matter that, against the odds, he made it. Hurling to an All-Ireland club final with Wolfe Tones in 1997, excelling as Clare's last custodian through the exultant years of 1995 and 1997 didn't cancel out the memory. Childhood experiences like that can make or break a player, he believes.

"Yeah. I do. Yeah. The thing about hurling is that there is always something at stake. When you play soccer or tennis, you lose a game and so what. But hurling, be it an under-12 or a challenge game or a senior All-Ireland final, there is something at stake. You would be as geared up for an under-21 game as you would be for an All-Ireland final."

Somewhere along the way, Lohan fixed on what he believed was the right approach and he has never deviated from it. During Clare's metamorphosis, he trained with such intensity that Loughnane and Mike McNamara would pair the more devious participants alongside him as Lohan wouldn't so much as dream of cutting corners.

Week after week, season after season, the quiet one hurled as if in a composed fury. Gradually the others noticed and then they fell into quiet awe and before long his presence and reputation seemed as timeless and rich as the game itself.

"It was the lost causes he used chase," says Liam Doyle. "You would see him going after balls that he had no right to get and so often he would come away with it and to watch him clear it would give you such a lift. It gave the whole of Clare a lift."

It became one of the more common but never less than phenomenal sights in those years when Clare delighted in ripping through staid tradition. Lohan delivering a sliotar beyond its point of origin, away from his territory, Lohan clearing his line.

Those epic drives and the famous red helmet became his signature notes.

"I used to wear a black one," he sighs. "But when I was a minor, some fella pulled and hit the back of my head and made shit of my black helmet. I took it off and it was in bits and I needed a new helmet. I just got that one and I've had it for years and years. It needs a break now. I don't know what I was thinking."

He guffaws sheepishly.

"A red helmet. I just dunno."

It's a part of him now, part of the game, wrapped up in the highlight films of 1995 and '97 and in Ó Muircheartaigh's serenades to the wireless faithful of Ireland. Brian Lohan would be extremely uncomfortable of words like "greatest" and "legend" used in proximity with his own name, but that is the way they speak of him.

"One of the greatest defenders of all time," says Jamesie O'Connor. "And I wouldn't say that lightly."

"Sometimes," says Brian Quinn, who will hurl alongside him tomorrow, "when he is going well, you think you are only getting in his way."

+

TODAY, Lohan is a survivor of a great Clare team that had the rare quality of being able to fascinate and madden people in equal measure. There was a time not so long ago when it was impossible not to have an opinion on the Clare hurlers. He admits he has changed a little from that time and prefers not to return to the at once painful memories of 1998.

"We felt we were hard done by, others felt we were too sensitive and around it goes in an endless circle."

Sometimes he wishes he had spoken then when he remained quiet. One night he was accosted by a stranger and listened politely while a lecture was delivered about Colin Lynch. Loughnane got wind of it and marched over to deliver the other side of the story in that wonderful and sometimes frightening Loughnanian tongue.

"Straight in," he recalls with admiration. " He isalways so loyal, which I admire. But I was asking myself why I hadn't done that, why I hadn't stood up and said the same thing."

But it's just not who he is. Those times left him weary and after the All-Ireland semi-final loss of 1999 against Kilkenny, Clare suddenly became yesterday's news, perhaps not in their own eyes, but to the more fickle world at large.

Although Lohan applied the familiar ascetic practices, Clare began losing narrowly and suddenly found All-Ireland finals looked as remote as the winter stars they trained under. He played on, kept his doubts to himself and just lived, same as the rest of us. Last year, he followed the Munster rugby team the whole way to Cardiff and found himself appalled at the covered roof.

"You associate rugby with freezing cold and a bit of hardship and steam on the pitch. It just . . . I dunno, it didn't seem real."

He happened to be in New York for baseball's subway series in the autumn of 2000. Instantly, he became enchanted.

"Wow. Baseball. An amazing game. We used to go round the bars that were full of Mets fans. I was for the Yankees, whatever it was. And it was just brilliant. To see these guys, Derek Jeter and the money they were on, and the way they would just be traded to different franchises during the year. And reading about their backgrounds. It was really fabulous."

It is a great image, that of Lohan among the shimmering bar crowds of Manhattan or Brooklyn, just an Irish guy besotted with his adopted team, just a fan. Light years away from the red helmet. He remains an avid follower of the Yankees, sharing his enthusiasm with David Hoey and it remains an ambition of his to swing a bat.

"We went down to the batting cages one day, but there was something up. I'm told that anything up to 90 m.p.h. you can hit but once it's up at 100 or 105 m.p.h. . . ." Fugeddabout-it.

At least for this Fall.

Tomorrow, Lohan has his own world series to contend with again. He can admit now that he had grave doubts about gracing the most magnificent stage again.

"It's been so long that it is as if this is my first All-Ireland. Definitely we had doubts, to the point that we were asking, 'how do we win a game?' And we were not pulling well together because we had those doubts. But we got a break this year, thankfully. And I think we deserved it."

Perhaps the gods believe the country is ready for another electric September Sunday from Clare. Lohan delivers no promises. It is not his style. At the forbidding height of his game, he is grateful just to be playing in autumn's showpiece.

For he has reached the age when the seasons ahead are no longer endless. You ask him about his legacy and for the second time only, his mild features crease in agitation. "Mmmh. The thing that would have bothered me . . . hang on, is that too much information now, I'm just thinking." He laughs, perplexed at himself.

"I'll tell you, when you are winning, it's . . . it's grand and mmh. No, I'll leave it, I just don't want to . . . I'd be better leaving it." He laughs and shrugs.

You know what he means. Best not to jinx it. Best not to compromise whatever it is that feeds the flame. Brian Lohan has some hurling to get on with and words won't get it done.

"The thing about hurling is that there is always something at stake. When you play soccer or tennis, you lose a game and so what. But hurling, be it an under-12 or a challenge game or a senior All-Ireland final, there is something at stake."