Talisman sees the big picture

Jamesie O'Connor pads along the still corridors of St Flannan's. There is a rare finality about the silence in all empty schools and this old place - a grey-bricked, regal diocesan triumph dating back to 1880 - commands whispers anyway. "You'll know it by the trees," said a guy in the petrol station.

Although the kids have gone for the summer, a half dozen have draped themselves against a door, the picture of studied lethargy. They nod and murmur at O'Connor, half-respect for the teacher, half-reverence for the hurler.

Jamesie strides on with that easy, jaunty step of his. His workplace here represents the origin of a brief loop away from Clare. After leaving Flannan's for Galway in 1990, he came back to his alma mater for a work placement four years later and eventually secured a position there. He always figured hurling would see him gravitate back towards Clare anyhow and so the situation was perfect. There are circles to all lives and as another June breaks sunlessly over Ennis, Jamesie finds himself contemplating another leap into the most talked up rivalry in modern Irish sport.

The world stops turning when Clare meet Tipp. We refer to the flashpoints of the last decade now as stepping stones back to the cathartic day when Tipp pulped Clare in the 1993 Munster final. If ever Nicky English could retract one smile in his life - innocent as it might have been - it surely would have been that which followed his late, token point. Burned wounds into some hearts that day.

Jamesie smiles at the mention of that day now. "It's as if it was light years ago. When I look back on 1993, I had no idea of what it took to win a Munster final. I was 20, a kid really, and being in Galway, I was removed from the whole hype. Afterwards, sure, I was disappointed, but it wasn't the watershed for me the way it possibly was for some of the other lads. No, it was when we got by Tipp the year after and then lost to Limerick that I found the most devastating. That was the bitter one for me."

Although he zooms around fields like a restless spirit, Jamesie cuts an amused and laid-back figure away from the game. The antithesis of the sporting firebrand. No wartime analogies for him.

"A lot has been said and written about this enmity between ourselves and Tipperary. The truth is that I don't know a lot of the Tipp lads. You just don't meet other lads on the inter-county scene. With all games with them, there have been no bad strokes, the games were of a good spirit.

"I think the players like to get on with it and would prefer it if this sideshow wasn't on. People telling us, oh, it's the war of the world. Players just want to conduct themselves well," he shrugs.

And yet he lurks somewhere within the Tipp psyche, does Jamesie, a wraith with the ball on his hurl in the last seconds of the 1997 All-Ireland final. A bad dream sequence not revisited lightly in Tipp.

But still, a glorious moment in sport. You hear Micheal O Muircheartaigh's captured poetry and picture his words floating to various outposts across the universe.

"Colin Lynch, the Lisseycasey man, Colin Lynch flings it to the wing to Jamesie," calls an urgent O Muircheartaigh above a delicious, muffled well of noise. "Jamesie is 60 yards out, Jamesie is 50 yards out, he tries a shot from way, way down the field . . . it's over the bar and the man who snags it is Gerrrrrr Lough-nane."

Earlier this week, the RTE man agreed that it was a score he'll never forget.

"Ger Loughnane almost waved the flag, he was right there behind the goal. I like to think that 'twas his way of explaining what the likes of Jamesie meant to him. He's not a big fella, Jamesie, but year after year if Clare need a score to survive, they get the ball to him."

Ask Jamesie if those seconds stand alone, though, and he'll gently guide the nostalgic beam on to a bus winding back towards Cracklow and Newmarket late on the night of the 1995 Munster final. That evening above all, he reckons, is frosted with perfect recollections.

But Jamesie and Tipp. After the fireworks of last year's duel, O'Connor found himself ringing Loughnane from the hospital in Cork. The arm went 22 minutes into the Saturday replay after he went tumbling into a rush of Tipp players. Jamesie sat nursing it in ice for the rest of the game, Clare's whirlwind second-half his only anaesthetic.

"I knew at the hospital by the way the girl was speaking that it was broken. They said they could operate that night if I wanted, but when I called Ger he wanted to know who was on, wanted the best. As it happened, the top orthopaedic guy in Cork was on that night, so we went away. The Lohans and Seanie McMahon were in to me the next day. I was pissed off all right, but I set myself a date on which to return and thankfully I met that."

O'Connor laughs when he finds himself admitting that he occasionally comes the old man at training, moaning about the severity and repetition. After 1995, that carnival summer, seasons slid into one another and Clare's hurling legend ballooned after the 1997 triumph until everything went up in smoke in headlines and sheer strangeness a year later. The Saturday night after they'd thought they'd beaten Offaly in the All-Ireland semi-final replay, Jamesie found himself hanging out in the Burlington with the rest of the Clare population. Word of another replay took flame.

"We'd been with the Offaly lads afterwards and they were wishing us luck in the final. Then it was like, sorry, ye have to do it all again lads. After we were beaten, Ger just said no complaining. In a way, there was a weird sense of relief when it was all over. It was a very emotional year, with the Jimmy Cooney thing and what happened to Colin (Lynch). It all caught up on us."

If anything, the enigma of this Clare squad intensified after 1998. It was a far cry from the honeymoon times of three years earlier. The backlash after Loughnane thundered over the airwaves, the reportage in the wake of the Munster final and then Clare accept a surreal exit from the championship with exceptional grace.

"Ger has to take a lot of the credit for that. We were beaten by a better team. But as for the whole thing, well, I think some of the players were disappointed about some things. I felt that there was a breach of trust by certain journalists with whom we had a good relationship. But things move on."

And fast. Jamesie feels like an old rancher now. Made it on the frontier. And still only 27. Hard as they trample, we are inclined to see weeds growing under the feet of a great team. Epitaphs or new chapters will be written tomorrow. Yet they still have some magic in them and there is probably a few great orations left in the manager. Jamesie is well used to such blasts.

"Ger, you know, he's a fairly private guy. I suppose he does keep a bit of distance between himself and the team. Like, I know him for 10 years but you wouldn't be ringing him to see if he was on for a night in the pub," he laughs.

"No, I think Ger is like anybody else, likes to go out for a meal with his wife. Like, I met him coming out of the cinema there a few weeks back. We were each there with our wives at the film American Beauty. So he comes over anyway and says, `get that gun, Caroline, get that gun'."

What Jamesie will cherish most about tomorrow is the run-out on to the field. You can't really know the raptures of a crowd until they are directed at you.

"Pairc Ui Chaoimh is a bowl anyway, it retains the noise. Last time we played Tipp there, the PA guy called our names out. This huge roar goes up for number three, Lohan. Later, he told me he felt like going home after it. I hear Nicky (English) say there that he read a sign saying `why do we put ourselves through this'. It's true, but would you want it any other way?"

No. Tomorrow in Cork is as good as sport gets. With the whistle, though, Jamesie works. Loves to hurl but at this level can find no enjoyment. Only in the victory. As Jamesie sees it, hurling is just what he does, as natural as breathing.

He tells a story about meeting Cork footballer Ronan McCarthy in a bookshop in Boston last year. "We had a great chat, you know, just two ordinary guys in a bookshop, mano a mano."

And it's a great image, because on days like tomorrow, it's easy to forget that Jamesie has a street life. That he watches TV, curses on golf fairways. Observe Jamesie, spike-haired and buzzing among the others, and you could fool yourself into believing that all these guys exist for this reason only. Fool yourself into thinking that for this game, time stands still.