JAMESIE O’CONNOR WAS glad to see the 1998 championship come to a conclusion.
The defence of their All-Ireland crown was punctuated by defeat to Offaly in the All-Ireland semi-final– an infmaous tie that took three games to determine a winner.
The first replay ended in calamitous circumstances, with Clare emerging as victors when referee Jimmy Cooney prematurely blew the full-time whistle.
The mistake prompted Offaly fans to pour onto the Croke Park pitch to stage a sit-down protest and the decision was later taken to hold another rematch.
Offaly prevailed in the third installment of the semi-final saga, and Clare’s season was over.
But that wasn’t the only contentious moment in Clare’s championship that year.
The Offaly affair was preceded by two matches against Waterford in the Munster final, the second of which consisted of some particularly consequential flashpoints.
Red cards were distributed in both games, Clare’s Colin Lynch was retrospectively hit with a three-month suspension after the replay, and a lot of the subsequent commentary seemed to portray Clare as the instigators of the clashes.
O’Connor reflects on it all as an exhausting sequence of events, and their exit at the penultimate stage of the championship brought some order back into his life.
“By the end of 1998 and all the stuff that happened with Offaly, it was a crazy year,” he tells The42.
“I certainly felt a sense of relief that I could go back to living a semi-normal life again. I would say to a certain extent that it probably did have a draining effect on the players.
“You couldn’t really escape it, it was all over the papers. It was taking up a lot of column inches and people were talking about it.
“Dalo (Anthony Daly) and some other players say that they wouldn’t swap ’98 for anything but I certainly feel at the same time (that) it was the one that got away.
“I’d look back on it with regret in a sense and I think I would swap it for another All-Ireland.”
The Munster hurling championship is a tournament laced with rivalries, but prior to 1998, there was no major history between Clare and Waterford.
In his book, ‘Raising The Banner,’ then Clare manager Ger Loughnane explained how that absence of familiarity with the Déise, ultimately disarmed his side.
“There was nothing there to give us an edge against them. All of us went down there with the nearest thing to a casual attitude in my time as Clare manager. The same drive wasn’t there.”
As a collective, Waterford were comparably more eager for the battle that lay ahead.
There were sightings of Waterford figures occupying the Clare dugout before throw-in, and Waterford boss Gerald McCarthy reportedly abused some of the match officials when calls didn’t go their way.
Their aggressive mentality inspired Waterford to an almost match-winning display, which fell just short of the finish line when Paul Flynn’s last-minute free tailed wide.
Much of the Clare contingent struggled to withstand the Déise ambush throughout the drawn game, but O’Connor managed to hold firm in the forward line.
His respectable efforts meant that he was spared the lashing of Loughnane’s tongue, when the players reconvened for training the following Tuesday.
If Clare were guilty of any complacency in the first outing, Loughnane made sure to eradicate the cobwebs in time for the replay.
Certainly Loughnane was, let’s just say “up for it” in the week of the game. I remember on the first night back at training, he shepherded us all into the goals at the top end and he started with Fitzy (Davy Fitzgerald) and the puckouts, and took it line by line down the field.
“There was a real edge to Loughane and from the edge of that session you could sense he was ratty and he was going to set the tone from the off.
“When Loughnane was cranky, you were keeping your head down and bracing yourself for the acidity that he could create with what he said to you.”
I didn’t get his wrath, but I got it after the replay when the rest of the lads performed. I don’t have any fond memories of the replay.”
O’Connor had evaded the clutches of his marker Brian Greene in the first outing, but his luck ran dry the following weekend, when the Waterford defender laid down an early marker to subdue O’Connor.
“Brian Greene wasn’t going to allow me to do what I did the first day. I went to go shake his hand before the replay and he shook his head.
“The next thing he hit me a dunt and I went to shove him away with my hurl and broke my hurl clear off his shoulder before the ball was thrown in.
“I’m waving the hurley running to the sideline for a replacement as the ref is throwing in the ball.
Clare cruised to a comfortable win the in that replay, despite losing defender Brian Lohan to a red card, after he was involved in a skirmish with Waterford’s Michael White.
It was by no means an isolated moment of unsavoury conduct, and it was apparent from the outset that this was going to be a sour contest.
Before the throw-in, referee Willie Barrett even marched over to the sideline to caution the respective management teams.
And while O’Connor was on the hunt for a new hurl to replace the one that Greene’s shoulder broke apart, wild strokes were being exchanged in the middle of the field.
Clare’s Colin Lynch would later be suspended for his part in it, but as O’Connor remembers it, Clare’s other midfielder Ollie Baker absorbed most of the hits.
“Lynch is hitting Baker probably more than he connected with Tony Browne and Peter Queally from Waterford.
“I remember at one stage in the second half, I think Fergal Hartley had given David Forde a dunt off the ball.
“I spotted it and ran in thinking to hit Hartley a shoulder. Greene came in and hit me, and the next thing Baker arrived and skinned everybody.
“Certainly, there was a lot of stuff going on off the ball.”
Almost everyone on the pitch was guilty of rough play, and yet it was Clare’s Colin Lynch who was punished in the aftermath.
Despite no mention of him in the referee’s report, the Munster Council charged him with ‘repeated striking with the hurley,’ which led to a three-month suspension.
The overall post-match analysis was deemed to have been unfair towards Clare, and Loughnane recalls in his book how a few solicitors encouraged him to take a case against RTE, for a sports radio show that allegedly demonised the Clare team.
“It did appear to be quite one-sided,” O’Connor remembers. “Listen, Colin was no saint in terms of what happened but Tony Browne had a fine game the first day and was man of the match.
“Colin probably felt that he under-performed and Loughnane had probably raised the stakes.
He was probably more fired up than anybody else. I think the last thing Colin wanted was to be in the eye of that storm. There’s no doubt about, it was probably a very tough year for him.
“There was nothing about Colin in the referee’s report, and he was suspended basically on the evidence of some guy sitting in the stand where you probably could have found another guy in the stand who would have seen something else.”
Winning that Munster title in 1998 was Clare’s third provincial crown in four seasons, and they followed it up with another appearance in the final the following year.
The intervening years however, saw Clare drift into a kind of barren land, yielding just one more display in a Munster final.
After losing out to Cork in 1999, Tipperary prevailed against them in 2008.
The sorrowful mystery remains as to why contemporary Banner teams have failed to match the standards of their 90′s predecessors in Munster, particularly since they have won an All-Ireland since then.
And while Clare were struggling, other counties thrived.
A rivalry between Waterford and Cork dominated some of the Munster finals in the early 2000′s, Tipperary’s showing had always remained steady, and Limerick ducked in and out of finals as well.
Clare have come out of that hibernation and are back in the Munster final this weekend.
They will face an in-form Cork side, who have accounted for Tipperary and Waterford on the way to this year’s decider.
Clare on the other hand, needed just a win over Limerick to get to the decider, and O’Connor believes that could work in their favour in their bid to win a first Munster title in 19 years.
“The performance the last day won’t be good enough to beat Cork, there’s no question about that. But the worst thing you can do, is play well in the semi-final.
“The way to get to a final is fall over the line and Clare pretty much did that.
There were certain aspects of their performance that were good, but there were certain aspects of their game that weren’t good enough, the players and management know that
“Is there a big performance in Clare? I think there is. I think they have a great chance on Sunday.
“Cork haven’t really been in a situation where they’ve been on the back foot, and been maybe rocked by a couple of quick goals.
“They’ve very much been on the front foot and you have to credit them for that because they’ve been at it from the off, but I think if Clare can ask a few questions of them on Sunday, it might be a different story.
“Cork were put under the gun against Tipperary and they really had to play well against Waterford the last day, and did so. It’s very hard to put three of those games back-to-back in Munster.
“I think if Clare can get enough ball into the forward line and our big players perform, I think we really have a great chance.”
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