CLARE played well on Sunday but there must have been moments when Mike McNamara felt a twitch of panic.
Even as Clare blitzed Waterford in the second half and McNamara watched impassively, some doubts must have surfaced.
Clare, after all, hadn’t won a game in Munster in five years. This was uncharted territory. Waterford may have lacked the usual rapier thrust but John Mullane was swatting over points for fun. Was McNamara wor- ried? Even just a little bit?
‘The last time I got worried was 1963 or four, I think, when I was sent off to boarding school,” said McNa- mara afterwards, standing, coinci- dentally enough, underneath a fire “EbweeP
Don’t worry be happy lads, seemed to be the message. And why not. Be- side McNamara, the Clare dressing room glowed with a sense of achieve- ment and with good cause. Clare won by nine points. They scored two goals. The new lads, particularly Mark Flaherty looked comfortable. More importantly for McNamara though, the win went some way to restoring Clare’s reputation in Mun- Nis
He said, “We’ll we’ve prepared for this the same as an All-Ireland final. We had to come out of the hole we were in. Clare hurling was slipping in a bad way. Even our supporters were deserting us in droves. We had to put in a big performance. We trained for this like it was an All-Ireland final because we felt we had to. It would be interesting to know whether there is anymore in us or not, but that’s for another day.”
McNamara was un-sparing in his assessment of Clare’s recent out- ings in Munster. Clare, he said, had reached a point of no return making a win on Sunday essential.
‘“We’ve been close to a disgrace in Munster for a long number of years now. For those of us, who came up in the old school, the old way, Mun- ster was our goal and our ambition and our pride and our honour. We’re proud to be part of a Munster tradi- tion of hurling and we have to put our
best foot forward today. We couldn’t let 1t go down the line any further.”
By the time they had clocked off, Clare’s forwards had put in a solid 70 minutes of hard work. McNamara was pleased.
“It’s the key to success, work rate. If you have a forward line that aren’t working then you can’t win matches, particularly big matches. We spoke a lot about the lost cause and the one ball that they didn’t contest; it may or may not change the whole course of the game. We spoke about it now for a month. Every ball was vital to those lads today and every ball had to be won and that’s they way we saw
it. That’s the way we approached it and as you saw they did it right until the very end.”
The goals, McNamara acknowl- edged were hugely important and perhaps a little surprising.
“Funny enough we haven’t been scoring them, even in training we were missing goals. It was a pleasant surprise that we could get the goals and the goals came today.”
Asked to consider the challenge of Limerick, McNamara’s thoughts drifted back to 1996 and Clare’s de- feat at the hands of their neighbours in the semi-final of the Munster Championship.
“Of course there is always a bite in a Limerick/Clare match. We can go back, was it 12 years ago, here on that famous day, that we might be able to get a bit of revenge. Who knows, who knows.”
About an hour later, on the Coon- agh roundabout, a proud looking Ollie Baker could be seen riding shotgun in the team bus, shaking his fist defiantly, as Clare headed home. Who knows indeed?