It might only be 15 years ago, but Martin Daly's last-second winner for Clare against Cork gives us a glimpse of a different era, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

EVEN 15 years later, it’s an ending that would cause a screen-writing student to flunk his finals. With the second-last kick of the game, Ger Keane flicked a free to Martin Daly on the Cork 20-metre line. Clare were two points down and half the eyes on the action were slung over shoulders as the crowd headed for the gate. Even in the days before packed defences, you didn’t pinball your way through an intercounty defence with the last attack of the game to grab a winning goal.

You surely didn’t do it when you were Clare and they were Cork.

Go find it on YouTube sometime you have an idle minute. The footage may as well be in black and white. When Keane casually tips the ball to Daly, he’s just on the edge of the exclusion zone. There’s no Cork player standing a foot in front of Keane to slow down the ball, nobody even accidentally-on-purpose running across his eyeline. The ball hops – hops! – into Daly’s chest dead in front of goal about 15 metres out. Three Cork defenders go to the general area, but you’d hardly call it a sheet, much less a blanket.

Daly takes a hop and a turn and heads for goal. Cathal Shannon runs across his line, momentarily unbalancing Cork full back Mark O’Connor who, for a split second, can’t decide whether to track him or block Daly’s route to Valhalla. The hesitation is fatal as Daly pokes a low shot that rolls under both him and the covering Brian Corcoran and wends its way into the bottom corner.

It’s literally the last kick of the game – there isn’t even time for the kick-out.

Looking at it in 2012, the whole scene feels alien somehow. The players are willowy by comparison to today, their jerseys rippling far more obviously than their biceps. There’s an element of slapstick in the goal as well – from the time Daly collects the ball to the moment it hits the net six seconds later, no fewer than four Cork defenders plus the goalkeeper end up on the floor, yet barely a finger is laid on him.

When Larry Tompkins finished up as Cork manager six years later, he named as one of his abiding regrets the fact he kept Niall Cahalane on the bench for the last 20 minutes of that game, the implication being there’s no way Daly’s goal would have been scored on Cahalane’s watch.

But what strikes you watching it now is the sheer absence of bodies in front of the Cork goalmouth. Each of the defenders is not only present, but oh-so correct, holding their positions and leaving just O’Connor and Corcoran to mind the middle. There’s only one wing forward back lending a hand. It seems almost quaint now to think they would allow such latitude at any stage in the game, never mind the very last attack.

“Larry and Niall Cahalane were together standing on the sideline,” says John O’Keeffe, Clare manager that day. “I’d say they were planning about how to play Kerry in the Munster final at that stage. The shock left Larry totally overwhelmed. It was the best way to do it. It was the one and only way of doing it, I think.”

The world turns, the game evolves. Conor Counihan and Michael McDermott were selectors that day, lieutenants under Tompkins and O’Keeffe. The game they will preside over tomorrow in Limerick couldn’t exist in a more different context to that one in 1997. Cork are 1/100 for the game, with most bookmakers putting the handicap at 12 points. Whatever chance there was of Clare getting close enough for a last-minute attack to matter in 1997, there is no chance in 2012.

Clare 1-14 Cork 1-13. A result like that simply can’t happen these days.

The distance between top table and below stairs these days is just too vast. Measure it any way you please – physical power, scoring power, financial support – the ocean is as wide as it is deep.

But back then a county like Clare could survive and hold their own in and around the top 10 to 15 teams in the country. They were only five years removed from a Munster title and were playing in Division 1B of the league.

Cork had needed a replay to see them off the previous year and the 1997 game was seen beforehand as a tricky encounter for Tompkins and his side. One they should come through right enough but no gimme.

“Clare had their fair share of good players at the time,” says O’Keeffe. “Martin Daly, Ger Keane and Francis McInerney were forwards who would have been comfortable in any team in the country at that time. And the other thing that the Clare team had was that they could match Cork in many positions on the field in the physical stakes.

“That’s one of the main differences at the moment. The present Cork team are so strong and so powerful and hard-running that the present Clare team won’t be able to hang on to them. That wasn’t the case in ’97. The physical preparation of the top teams now has gone on to a completely different level.”

It was one of the last summers where the peloton wasn’t left gasping as soon as the race went into the mountains. Cavan won Ulster, Offaly won Leinster. Although Maurice Fitzgerald danced Kerry to the All-Ireland title, it was their first in 12 years. Mayo went into the final as favourites, so much so that the local papers famously printed the plans for the homecoming celebrations the week before the game was played. The notion that there could be an immutable top three or top four in the country who were untouchable just didn’t exist.

“Even with an open draw in Munster,” says O’Keeffe, “the gap between Kerry and Cork and the rest is far greater now than it was. I managed Limerick for four years and Clare for four years and we always felt we had a chance in those matches. But now I just feel that the gap has widened and it’s enormous now.”

Any top four list of contenders in 1997 would have had Cork in it alright, it wasn’t a case of them being raggle-taggle and Clare taking advantage.

They were primed for a serious run to the All-Ireland that year, having trained 185 times in 251 days. One night the previous October, they were out running their legs to stumps on the beach in Inchydoney when a couple of English tourists walked past an exhausted Kevin O’Dwyer lying on the flat of his back. “When’s the match?” they enquired. “Next June,” he replied.

Nicholas Murphy was just a gawky teenager straight out of minor back then.

He hadn’t played a championship game for Cork yet and Daly’s snuffing out of their candle that day meant he wouldn’t do so until the following summer. He remembers not just the shock of the day itself but the empty feeling afterwards. They were finished playing football and it wasn’t even July yet.

“It was like a morgue in the dressingroom, to be honest,” he says. “We had so much possession of the ball in the first half but we kept putting the ball wide and we just never put them away when we had the chance. It just shows the doggedness of them – once they have a sniff, they can keep going and hang around and be dangerous. The goal won it with the last kick of the game and that was the end of the summer.”

The advent of the qualifiers changed everything and is probably as responsible as any one factor for the growth in the distance between top and tail now. Though it raised all boats and unshackled the traditionally tethered on occasion, it lengthened the summers of the superpowers most of all.

Sports science moved on, training methods moved with it. Budgets moved too for a time before being scaled back disproportionately in the places where success was a distant speck. Now the best teams are the best-financed and everyone else just hangs in.

The days when a Clare can feasibly imagine they might have enough for a Cork in terms of legs, physique, tactical sophistication and pure depth of talent are gone. The days when a Clare forward as talented as Daly would have the time and space to manoeuvre his way into collecting not particularly dirty ball and knifing the winning goal with the last kick of the game are gone too. No serious team worth its full-back screen would allow it these days.

At half-time in the 1997 match, a restless Billy Morgan left his seat in the press box and ran down to the sideline. It was Cork’s first championship match without him as manager since he’d called time the previous summer, but their string of bad wides coming up to the break meant he could contain himself no longer. He ran down and grabbed the first selector he could find and told him to warn the players to concentrate.

Cork had drawn with Clare in the previous year’s Munster championship and it had been down to carelessness. Cork had plenty of guns but Clare were far from cannon-fodder.

Different times now. Wherever Morgan is sitting tomorrow, we can take it the Cork sideline will go unburdened.