By John Harrington
In 1989, Clare fell to a humbling 10-point defeat to Tipperary in the Munster Senior Football Championship.
At the time it was regarded as a new low for the county, yet just three years later 10 of the players who were involved against Tipperary that day would win a historic Munster title for the Banner County.
The appointment of John Maughan as Clare manager was the turning point.
Clare’s Munster Council delegate, Noel Walsh, was a former Clare manager himself and knew Maughan because they were both army-men.
Maughan had coached Defence Forces teams since his own playing career was ended by injury at the age of 25, and Walsh had heard good things.
Clare were in disarray when Maughan took charge, with just 13 players turning up for his first training session after a League defeat to Waterford in 1990, but the Mayo-man relished the challenge of whipping them into shape.
"I suppose I brought organisation to it,” he told the Irish Independent in 2012.
“At that stage there was a certain discipline and structure to my life, basic things like timekeeping.
"We trained hard, sometimes very hard. I was young and able to do a lot of it myself. We did great sessions out on Lahinch beach and around by the golf club. It was as much for mental as physical conditioning.
"And there were great sacrifices made. Frankie Griffin came home from London every weekend for training and matches. That was a time now when travel wasn't as cheap nor as regular as it is now.”
John Maughan, Clare Manager celebrates with Clare player Frankie Griffin after victory over Kerry, Kerry v Clare, Munster Football Championship Final, Gaelic Grounds.
From the start, Maughan made it clear he was fully invested in the job.
At the first training session he turned up wearing a Mayo jersey only to take it off to reveal a Clare jersey.
To further show how committed to the Clare cause he now was he completed many of the most punishing physical sessions alongside the players. The message was loud and clear, they were all in this together.
Not only did Maughan take part in the Clare training sessions, his wife Audrey, a formidable athlete herself, often did too.
Seamus Clancy would win an All-Star in 1992, but the height of his ambition when he started training under Maughan was to finish ahead of Audrey in those punishing runs on Lahinch beach and Crusheen Hill.
“I’d come back from Australia not fit, so me and the running wasn’t the greatest but the one thing I had to do was finish ahead of Audrey,” Clancy told the Irish Examiner in 2012.
“I’d be bursting my arse just to stay ahead of her. Once 12 o’clock in the day would come, you’d start thinking about training, going ‘Oh Jesus, tonight’s going to be tough’.
“You’d eat no dinner because it would be only coming back up. You’d start off with 20 laps.
“If you went down to a county team now and said, ‘Right, lads, 20 laps to warm up’, they’d tell you, “F*** off, you don’t know what you’re talking about’. Even back then you’d have people laughing, ‘Are ye playing Kerry on a beach?’
“But the thing about it was you were mentally tough from it. You didn’t want to be the one that was going to give up. No one gave up, only the lads who pulled off the panel.
“We lost some good footballers. They had to be wondering, what are we doing this for? We’d train at seven in Crusheen, the hurlers would train there from half-seven to half-eight and then we’d come in at quarter-to-nine and all the hot water would be gone.
“We’d get a few corned beef sandwiches while the hurlers were going into Ennis for a steak. But those of us who kept at it developed this savage friendship. The feeling after having done a session like that in the dressing room afterwards was fantastic.
“We had a sub on the panel called Liam Conneely. He was working in Sligo and he’d still be down in Lahinch at seven o’clock for training. One night he was frothing at the mouth during a savage run. He was actually in a state of delirium.
“But he had this thing, ‘I’m going to finish this’, and we had this thing, ‘He is going to finish it’, so myself and Joe Joe [Rouine] grabbed him by the hand and pulled him along. Because he was lifting us when you saw what he was ready to go through.”
Kerry's Jack O'Shea and the Clare footballers stand for the anthem befor the 1992 Munster SFC Final.
Clare soon began to see the reward for all the hard work they were doing under Maughan.
They won the All-Ireland ‘B’ Championship in 1991 and then reached the League Quarter-Final in 1992 where they were only beaten by two points by a Meath team that had contested four of the previous five All-Ireland titles.
By the time the Munster Championship rolled around, they’d built up some serious moment and defeated Tipperary in the Munster semi-final.
Until 1991, Kerry and Cork had always been kept on either side of the Munster draw, but Noel Walsh had successful lobbied the Munster Council to bring in an open draw instead.
That was a real game-changer for a county like Clare, because even if you could shock one of the giants of the province in any given year it was a near impossibility to defeat both of them.
That semi-final win over Tipperary secured a Munster Final showdown with Kerry, and Maughan was convinced his players were ready to lower the Kingdom’s colours.
"It was one of the few occasions in my lifetime I had that experience,” he said.
"I knew if the sky fell down that day that we were going to win that game. It was one of those unique feelings. I was just absolutely convinced we were going to do it."
Clare manager, John Maughan, celebrates after the final whistle blows in the 1992 Munster SFC Final.
Despite the Clare team’s pre-match confidence, in the early stages of the match it looked like one of those days when a underdog with an opportunity blows it.
They swarmed all over Kerry but missed a series of clear scoring chances, including a penalty.
Eventually a Colm Clancy point settled Clare down, and by the break they led by one.
Two Clare goals proved decisive in the second-half. First Colm Clancy hit the back of the net moments after Jack O’Shea had blasted a shot wide for Kerry at the other end of the pitch.
Then Martin Daly scrambled home a second and when the final whistle blew Clare were four points to the good and the Gaelic Grounds erupted to hail the county’s second ever Munster title and first since 1917.
“We fully believed we were going to win,” said Seamus Clancy, “but then when we won we couldn’t believe it!”
