Ever since Gerry O’Connor and Donal Moloney succeeded Davy Fitzgerald in charge of Clare the assumption was that we would see a team reconciled with its mojo, released from the chain gang of pre-dawn gym sessions and six-day training labours, liberated from double-knot defensive systems, happy in its own skin again. But in the modern game what does that mean exactly?
The belief was that Clare wouldn’t play with a seventh defender and that would seem to be the plan: Conor Cleary will play as an orthodox No 6. But in the behind-closed-doors challenge games that Clare played against Galway in Cusack Park and Waterford in Thurles in the last 17 days Tony Kelly and Podge Collins both dropped really deep from their nominal roles in the half forward line. They tracked out beyond centre field and kept going.
However, when you think back to Clare’s All-Ireland winning season in 2013 neither Collins nor Kelly were full-time forwards: they were link players who stitched the play around the middle third but still had the athleticism to push on and score. In the second half of Clare’s Munster semi-final defeat to Waterford last year Kelly accepted puck-outs in his own half, where he was no threat either as a finisher or a playmaker.
There won’t be a repeat of that. They need him on the ball, they need to use his coltish stride, they need him rifling three or four or five points as he is wont to do on any day. How Kelly is deployed reflects Clare’s change of emphasis: it is less about prescription and more about playing with a conscience.
Elsewhere in the attack Conor McGrath seems to have returned to the irresistible form he showed in the later stages of the 2016 League and was on fire against Waterford in Thurles last week. Along with Shane O’Donnell and Aaron Shanagher the Clare full-forward has a terrific blend of explosiveness and tenacity.
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It’s hard to know what to make of Limerick. The Cork team they beat in the League quarter-final contained 13 of the players who later accounted for Tipperary in the championship — although Conor Lehane and Shane Kingston were significant absentees — and there was an attractive spikiness about that performance in Pairc Ui Rinn. And then it vanished against Galway a week later when they were blown away.
Limerick are not a team that trades on flair. Cian Lynch is a clever player; Shane Dowling is capable of a big tally every day though his work rate remains an anachronism in the modern game; Graeme Mulcahy is industrious and productive, qualities that don’t always follow in sequence; the injured Gearoid Hegarty, though, is a serious loss as a ball winning option and the absence of Diarmuid Byrnes from the half back line is debilitating too. You can see Limerick tearing into Clare and making it difficult but this is the day for Clare to re-launch as contenders for greater glory.