JAMESIE O’CONNOR CASTS his mind back to a late May evening in 2000 and travelling cross-country for a challenge match in Kilkenny, eventually unfurling himself out of the car at the ground of Gowran Young Irelands.
Clare were just a week and a half out from meeting Tipperary in the Munster semi-final, who had already tuned-up in beating Waterford by three points in the quarter-final.
Unsure of what to do to recapture past glories, Clare manager Ger Loughnane reverted to type. He ran the guts out of his players, remorselessly.
“Loughnane had got the training badly wrong and he just flogged us and worked us incredibly hard,” says O’Connor.
Waiting for them that evening was a Kilkenny side in the second season under Brian Cody, smarting for having lost the 1999 All Ireland final to Cork.
They had another week’s grace on Clare before their Leinster semi-final against Dublin.
The competition for places among their squad was fevered.
“And they came out and absolutely ate us alive,” recalls O’Connor.
“Cody was settling into the job and we were probably seen as future competition down the line.
“We were badly over-trained and we just ran into a side… Well I was concussed on the same night and they just ate us without salt.”
When he considers his lengthy career and all that he accomplished, All-Ireland medals from club and county as the highlights, he winces at those challenge matches.
Hot summer nights. Rock hard pitches. Blisters on your soles and weeping callouses on your hands.
The bark of Loughnane, more personal and nowhere to hide from that voice.
Nobody in the ground but players, management and a smattering of officials.
Enough hopefuls around the fringes of the team getting precious minutes to make an impression, tearing into the established stars. They were some of the hardest hours he ever put in hurling.
“In 2001, we went down to Cork to play them in there,” he says.
“I was marking this young fella and he was good. He was athletic. He was strong and I remember thinking in the second half he was really abrasive with me. We were belting each other off the ball.
“But I asked afterwards, ‘why isn’t this guy starting?’ I don’t even think he made their championship panel, it was Ronan Curran.”
In time, Curran would become one of the finest centre-backs in the game, but not only did he not play championship that year, he didn’t feature the year after either.
That’s the strange chemistry that can be at play in those games. Managers are trying out things, cramming for the examination of the championship, having kept the arm over the homework during the league.
Realists among us, and O’Connor is one, would state that what happened in those games pulls rank on anything that has gone on in the league.
Which is why the meeting of Clare and Tipperary this Sunday in Portlaoise is such a curiosity.
Win it, and Clare then have a league final to go to. A trip across the country to Croke Park? A game against possibly Kilkenny but more likely Limerick?
Imagine for a second if they weren’t careful. They might even end up with a trophy. You might as well wear an anvil around your necks.
How would all that fit in with a possible ambush of Limerick in Ennis on 21 April when the real stuff starts in the Munster championship?
“It’s crazy in one sense that the secondary competition and we are having this conversation,” says O’Connor.
“They have Limerick coming to Ennis on 21 April and they are away to Cork seven days later. And their season effectively could be hanging by a thread.
“Everything in terms of Brian Lohan’s preparations, no more than John Kiely’s, is framed around being ready to go on 21 April and the Munster championship. That’s the reality.”
Last weekend, Lohan gave the Clare team a lick of fresh paint with a chance for the second string to impress against Offaly. They grabbed a one-point win.
Lohan must be wondering now just when Shane O’Donnell – who has a very modern policy of taking the league off – and ankle injury victim Tony Kelly are coming back to put some shape on the attack.
The absence has done no harm as others have emerged and leadership duties have been shared out. Still, they’ll be welcomed back with open arms.
O’Donnell rocked up to championship 2022 having played no league action after he spent time recuperating from concussion. Nobody really knew if they might see him in a Clare jersey again, but he has gone on to win All-Stars the last two summers.
Kelly is different, and will want to have that winter ankle operation tested.
This is not however, the game to find that out.
“Two weeks is the problem,” says O’Connor.
“As a player, you think you need to be firing two weeks out. Everything is calibrated. Maybe you think subconsciously that fellas are minding themselves and all the wee niggles. There’s all that side of it.
“Whereas a month out? Teams would be more willing to give it a lash, it is ample time to go full bore for the league.
“In some ways it would be better for the teams at the top of 1A and 1B to just go at it in a final and then we are done with it.”
Clare will turn up in Portlaoise and they will hurl away. Will they die on every single ball?
You must be joking.
That’s for 21 April in Ennis.
