He’s just wumming thelimericks because JK doesn’t have much time for him.
Shane McGrath, John Mullane, Jamsie all tipping Clare
Nicky God went for Limerick
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A loss here could finish Clare. That’ll get them over the line at the finish. They can’t afford to lose another one.
Limerick want to win but they don’t need to win. The game is as good as done , no point travelling
Limerick will hammer Clare today
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Sure it’s all in the head.
If that happens Clare will have a totally different mindset going into a quarter final in 2 weeks time.
They’ll be angry rather than riddled with self pity.
A Clare win or a hammering is the best outcome for them.
A narrow heroic defeat would be a disaster.
It’s all in the head innit.
All these lads keep confusing what they’d like to happen with what’s going to happen.
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I can see it being a narrow heroic defeat for Clare.
I’ll travel anyway. A day out.
But, whilst Limerick will want to win, Clare HAVE to win. That’ll be the difference. A loss, again, and again to Limerick, would probably finish them.
Munster Final Day
MUNSTER FINAL | MICHAEL FOLEY
Can Clare claim immortal victory to halt Limerick’s winning machine?
Having lost past two Munster finals, Clare are looking to emulate the likes of Tipperary by stopping a seemingly unstoppable side winning six successive titles
Sunday June 09 2024, 1.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Clare were beaten by Limerick earlier in the season but will hope things are different this time around
RAY MCMANUS/SPORTSFILE
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At the end of the 1980 Munster final, the scale of what Limerick had just achieved was scrambling everyone’s brains. Cork’s unstoppable run of five titles in a row had been halted. Limerick had beaten them in a Munster final for the first time since the war and the crowd were in, hoisting players on to their shoulders and carrying them from the pitch to the dressing room, where the tears were already flowing. When Sean Foley, the Limerick captain, got there everyone realised he hadn’t even received the Cup and brought him back out again.
After he returned, Foley went to every player, shaking their hand and whispering thanks into their ear. “We have waited 40 years for today,” he said.
Where Limerick stood that day, Clare now find themselves — facing an apparently immovable object that has blocked their way to all sorts of riches for years. Before 1980, Cork had beaten Limerick in three Munster finals over the previous five years; Clare have lost the past two to Limerick. The same way Clare faded alarmingly away in their Munster championship game against Limerick in April, Cork roared past Limerick in the 1980 league final having been brought to a replay, winning by nine points having trailed with 11 minutes left.
Flanagan was a key member of the Limerick side that thwarted Cork’s second attempt at six successive titles
RAY MCMANUS/SPORTSFILE
All that meant the week before the 1980 Munster final was filled with implorations from Limerick players to each other — and anyone else listening — to set all history aside. “I do not believe there is this hoodoo about playing Cork and it’s up to any player to convince himself that there isn’t, if he has any slight doubt at all,” Pat Hartigan said. “This time we need to win.”
But the stress lines were visible on the team. In Henry Martin’s book Unlimited Heartbreak, Limerick hurling’s equivalent of an agonising Old Testament charting the sorrows before the enlightened New Testament of the John Kiely era, John Flanagan remembered the splitting headache that left him lying on the dressing room bench with a towel on his face while the minor game was on. “I would say it was from the tension and pressure more than anything else,” he said.
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Flanagan’s first incursions into the game included a collision with John Horgan, followed by another with Martin Doherty, the Cork full back. “I felt every bone in my face shaking,” Flanagan said.
Then he flattened Dermot McCurtain, Cork’s great wingback, in a tackle that left McCurtain hanging on by a thread till after half-time. The tone was set. On this day, Limerick weren’t taking a step backwards.
Limerick players celebrate last year’s triumph against Clare and are now looking for their sixth successive Munster title
EÓIN NOONAN/SPORTSFILE
It was all the Cork players could talk about afterwards: Limerick’s hunger. In the face of such impatience and utter defiance, Cork started to look weary. They hit 17 wides. Tommy Quaid saved a 21-yard free and Cork fluffed three goal chances in the last few minutes to lose by four points.
“It wasn’t one big thing,” Cork’s Denis Coughlan said in his autobiography. “It was a lot of small things that went against us.”
Before Limerick on Sunday, only three teams have ever tilted at six Munster titles in a row, all of them from Cork — 1906, 1980 and 1987. None of them succeeded, scuttled on every occasion by the same intersections of circumstance.
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The 1906 final was part of a traffic jam of overlapping championship games from other years in which Cork lost the 1905 All-Ireland final in June 1907 before losing the 1906 Munster final to Tipperary two months later, looking completely zapped. The same general miasma against a team playing without a safety net dragged Cork down again in 1987.
Like Limerick with Clare again, Cork had broken Tipp a couple of times in the previous few years, swiping the 1984 Munster final from their grasp and ploughing through them in the following year’s showpiece. There was a story that summer of Tipperary raising £100,000 for their training fund on the sale of a racehorse. “Tipp will win the Derby before an All-Ireland,” said Mickey ‘Rattler’ Byrne, one of the made men from Tipperary’s All-Ireland victories decades before.
Tipperary stopped Cork from winning six-in-a-row in 1987, having lost twice to the same opposition during that run
RAY MCMANUS/SPORTSFILE
But Tipp were different in 1987 with their suits, team bus and a level of science and tactical thought beyond anything they applied for years. They were seven points up with 20 minutes left after Nicky English side-footed the ball past Ger Cunningham, Ian Rush-style. Then Kieran Kingston struck a goal that put Cork got ahead with a few minutes left before Pat Fox saved Tipp with a point to draw. Executing that successful salvage job, in itself, felt different. “We haven’t missed the boat,” the manager Babs Keating said.
Tipp were only pulling out from port. At half-time the following weekend, in Killarney, Keating repeated the speech he heard as a player at the same venue when Tipp won their last Munster championship in 1971. “Don’t go home tonight and say, ‘because I didn’t chase a ball Tipperary lost a Munster title,’” he told them.
They didn’t. Cork eventually cracked in extra time and Tipp cherished a victory that has endured since, above and beyond plenty of All-Ireland titles. Limerick always felt the same way about winning in 1980. The same opportunity is there on Sunday for Clare, to deliver an immortal victory for themselves and leave a potentially devastating dent on a previously impregnable team.
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“Cork have made a team out of us,” Keating said that eternal evening in Killarney. Limerick have already done that for Clare.
Now, the next step.
Munster SHC final
Clare v Limerick
FBD Semple Stadium, 4pm
Live on RTE2
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Never known such a low key build up to a Munster final.
No result would really surprise me. Clare still relying on a lot of lads from 2013. Limerick have put up a lot of mileage in the last seven years too.
The end usually comes much quicker than many expect. I doubt either team thinks about it but in terms of the all Ireland having one less game and a months break is absolutely massive.
Tony Kelly looking to complete the set. He’s won it at all with club and county bar a Munster medal. Limerick looking to become the first Munster side to do the six in a row.
I was looking there both hannon and Conlon were playing in the forwards in the 2013 clash. Now but at number six 11 years on. Some innings.
If Kelly doesn’t start Lohan will be absolutely lynched after the game. Our lads on the sideline very rarely get it wrong and that just might tell in the finish. We’ll need injuries to go our way too. That could be a factor too.
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Clare to win this.limerick are finished
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In the Horse & Hound, loading up on grub before the trek starts.
Hon the Treaty, 6 Munsters in a row.
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At least the next day we’ll have to win. Wanting to win is no good, you need to be in the having to win bracket.
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It will come down to who Colm Lyons decides to send off for nothing today I feel.
3 Likes
Hegarty might as well leave the Hurley at home
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A few months back, a couple of Clare hurlers were in the gym testing their bench-press strength when Shane O’Donnell ambled in. The two players were at their maximum capacity and were struggling to complete reps of eight, but they knew where this was going. One winked at the other. As soon as O’Donnell turned his back, they loaded another pile of weights on to the bar. O’Donnell hadn’t even warmed up when he lay down on the bench. Bang. Bang. Bang. He completed 12 reps without even blinking.
For a while now, everything has seemed a little effortless for O’Donnell. It never is, but O’Donnell has still made it appear that way. He didn’t return to collective training with Clare until St Patrick’s Day. His only game-time in the league was the second half of the league final. Yet three weeks later, O’Donnell was voted player of the month for April.
That 35 minutes against Kilkenny was the only game-time O’Donnell, 29, has seen in the last three leagues, but he has still managed to win successive All Stars and is currently the leading contender for hurler of the year. There have been times in this championship when O’Donnell has looked unmarkable. Unbreakable. Untouchable.
His numbers have been staggering. O’Donnell has only scored 1-6, but he has either directly assisted or been fouled for a staggering 2-17. Technically, that could be 3-17 as O’Donnell started and engineered the move which led to Diarmuid Ryan’s goal against Tipperary.
Kilkenny’s Martin Keoghan is the only player ahead of O’Donnell in this championship with assists, with 2-18, but Leinster is a different level to Munster and every team in Leinster has one more game. And still, O’Donnell has managed to have 26 shot assists, one more than Keoghan.
Could O’Donnell be scoring more? His conversion rate from play is 58 per cent. He could have had another 2-2 against Tipp; he blasted wide from close range and hit the bottom of the post. But he was still either directly or indirectly involved in 1-12 of Clare’s 1-24 points that afternoon. Staggering.
Assists are technically classed as the last pass for a score, or being fouled for a converted free, but there are so many layers to O’Donnell’s game now that any one category can never do full justice to his overall contribution, and how important he has become to Clare. That influence has been all the more powerful and important again in Tony Kelly’s absence.
O’Donnell was voted player of the month for April
When Tipp had reduced the margin to three points with eight minutes remaining, O’Donnell won a long puckout before breaking away from three defenders and slotting the point. “I am just shaking my head here in amazement,” Niall Moran said in his TV co-commentary. “He is just incredible.” Straight afterwards, O’Donnell was fouled for another converted free. Marquee plays in clutch moments have been a hallmark of O’Donnell’s career; his green flag against Kilkenny last July was the goal of the championship; his backhand catch off a puckout in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Dublin was another sprinkle of pure magic.
O’Donnell has been pulling rabbits out of the hat for years but this season has been his most consistent. He had often struggled to exert his full influence against Limerick in recent years but his performance in April was O’Donnell’s best in his last five games against the All-Ireland champions. That afternoon, O’Donnell set up 1-3, which should have been 2-4.
Eleven years after his monumental display in the 2013 All-Ireland final replay against Cork launched him across the hurling sky like a comet, when scoring 3-3 at only 19 years old, O’Donnell has landed into this championship like a meteor. He is such a weapon now that Clare can use him whatever way they need to wreak havoc.
O’Donnell doesn’t need measured ball like other forwards because he can secure possession whatever way it arrives. Against Waterford, O’Donnell won two balls when it didn’t appear physically possible for him to be able to do so. He is as brave as a lion, but much of that ball-winning capacity and lust for physicality is bound up in O’Donnell’s immense strength.
O’Donnell played a key role in Clare’s 2013 All-Ireland triumph
Despite being a coeliac, O’Donnell’s diet is pristine and is tailored to hone power. His numbers in the gym are off the charts, but it isn’t all about lifting heavy weights either. O’Donnell’s explosiveness is also on another level.
Almost all of his focus over the winter is on honing and developing those areas because his schedule allows it. Brian Lohan, the Clare manager, lets O’Donnell work away individually before he arrives back into collective training in mid-March.
“It’s kind of an unwritten contract,” O’Donnell said recently. “As long as I am performing and doing what needs to be done for the team, Brian and I are happy with that. I don’t think I’m certain that if I go back the first week in November that I’ll be on it the last week in April. The one thing it does offer you is that psychological, mental freshness.”
O’Donnell first saw the benefits of that approach in 2019 when missing the whole league while in Harvard University on a Fulbright scholarship. But his routine over the past three years began from a much darker starting point.
Kilkenny’s Keoghan is the only player in this championship with more assists than O’Donnell
In 2021, O’Donnell missed the championship after suffering a horrendous concussion. He thought his hurling career was over. “Playing with Clare wasn’t on my radar at all,” he said in November 2021. “I can’t emphasise how much it was not a priority. I missed my brain functioning in the way it should. That was all I missed.”
O’Donnell returned to play with Eire Óg in the club championship, but he was unsure as to his next move with Clare. “If I didn’t play one minute in the league next year,” he said in that same interview, “that wouldn’t bother me in the slightest” It hasn’t ever since. The past three years have been the best of his career.
In 2022, O’Donnell moved to the half-forward line and flourished in a new environment. As a goalscorer O’Donnell had never been confident in his point-shooting so he accepted the need to change his game. His father makes his hurleys and O’Donnell began using a heavier model. His evolution into becoming a stronger and better-rounded player has allowed O’Donnell to mature into a near unstoppable force since returning to his best position at full-forward this season.
O’Donnell has always taken as much pride in his studies and work as his studies
Despite being at the peak of his powers, the fear in Clare is that this is possibly O’Donnell’s last year as an inter-county player. “I wouldn’t rule out playing next year but I wouldn’t be absolutely certain I would either,” he said in May. “I want to work abroad and move abroad and take that opportunity while I still have it.”
Completing his PhD in microbiology, microbiomes specifically, showcased how O’Donnell has always taken as much pride in his studies and work as his hurling. O’Donnell’s interest in science was sparked after getting an astronomy set for Christmas when he was eight. One of his long-term goals is to become an astronaut.
That ambition is hindered by timing, and not being a US citizen, which means having to go through the European Space Agency, who do recruitment drives every 10-12 years. O’Donnell missed the last drive because he was finishing his PhD and he’s not sure where he will be when that window opens up again. Tens of thousands apply but the agency always look for researchers to do microbiome analysis to see how different organisms are surviving and interacting in zero-gravity environments.
So, it is possible. With O’Donnell, anything is.