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Liam Griffin speaking during the show. TG4
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'The headline was, 'Clare lose player to Switzerland'' - Liam Griffin's brief Banner career

The Wexford All-Ireland winning boss is the subject of the latest Laochra Gael documentary.

ALL-IRELAND WINNING manager Liam Griffin is the subject of next week’s Laochra Gael episode on TG4. 

The Wexford native famously led the county to Liam MacCarthy glory in 1996, but in the early days of his playing career he found himself hurling in Clare.

After winning an All-Ireland U21 crown with Wexford in 1965, Griffin moved to Clare to study Hotel Management in Shannon with the intention of getting into the family business. 

“When I got to Clare I was asked to join the Newmarket-On-Fergus hurling club and to me it was nirvana,” he recalls during the documentary.

“I arrived into certainly one of the best hurling club teams in Ireland playing at that time. 

“I never lost a match playing for Newmarket-On-Fergus. I keep telling them when I left it all fell asunder,” he laughs.

“I got to experience what it was like to wind up in a fantastic hurling team. Lucky enough I got picked for Clare after that and ended up playing with them for a short time. I played against Waterford in the championship, I played reasonably well and scored 1-2.”

Work with Intercontinental Hotels took him to Switzerland, which signalled the end of his days hurling with Clare.

“We beat Waterford and on the following Wednesday week I was on a plane to Switzerland. That was the end of my Clare career.

“I remember going out on the plane and someone handing me a newspaper, the Cork Examiner (it was) at the time. The headline on the sports page was ‘Clare lose player to Switzerland’. 

“I was very tearful the whole way to Switzerland at that stage. I was excited about what I was going to do but I was so disappointed to lose out on the hurling.”

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His father hailed from the Banner County and took enormous pride in seeing his son play with his home county.

“When I got on the Clare team we were playing Kilkenny in a league semi-final. Somebody (back home) had a transistor radio and my dad was sitting close to it.

“When I came out Mícheál O Hehir seemingly said, ‘Here’s young Liam Griffin from Rosslare in County Wexford, whose father Michael hails from Maurice’s Mills in County Clare.

“And…my father cried. When you look back on that, what it meant to him was just amazing. When he died my mother used to remind me of this story and to have no regrets…about how he died.”

In 1971, his father died tragically in a car accident in Scotland when Liam was driving.

“It took a big toll on me. Because I was in the car. I was driving at the time, while it was never my fault – I was blameless.

“It was the second holiday of his life, after his honeymoon. We said we’d go up to Scotland. So we stopped in Keswick on the way up through the Lake District. We were given a shortcut by this man in the hotel.

“There was roadworks but we shouldn’t mind them, we should turn off here and we’d save miles and miles off the road. So we took this man’s instructions but when we came off the road there was no barrier at the end.

“We shouldn’t really have been on that road. And when we came out a lorry hit us. We were lucky we weren’t all killed to be fair. He died a few days later in hospital. It was devastating to be honest.”

Liam Griffin features in the final episode of the current Laochra Gael series next Thursday night at 9.30pm.


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