Kiely keeping a Clare focus
THE Clare management team and players had made no secret that their entire focus this season has been on this Sunday and the Munster semi-final against rivals Limerick.
However, the Shannonsiders’ boss John Kiely doesn’t believe in signposting games for six months and opted for a different approach.
He didn’t want to put his young players under undue pressure ahead of the championship, so Kiely claims that they have only begun to talk about Clare in the past few weeks. Kiely recalls Anthony Daly’s Dublin talking about taking down Kilkenny for months before the 2012 championship and then when summer came, they fell flat against the Cats.
‘I think it puts an awful lot of pressure on players if you signpost a match for six months or so,’ he explains. ‘I have seen a lot of teams do that with games from a long way out, Dublin did it against Kilkenny a number of years ago under Anthony Daly and it ended in a considerable flop on the day.
‘It puts enormous pressure on players. We decided to give each game we played equal importance.’
Limerick’s impressive wing-back Diarmaid Byrnes, who captained the Under-21s to All-Ireland glory in 2015, hasn’t recovered from a knee injury in time for this local derby but Kiely believes his team are in decent nick, ahead of the match at Semple Stadium, which represents Sky’s first foray into live coverage of the Munster championship.
And the prize for both sides is huge with a Munster final place — and at least, an All-Ireland quarter-final. The losers on Sunday, though, will have to swim shark-infested waters in the qualifiers. ‘I am not saying I haven’t thought about the alternative to the huge prize at stake,’ says Kiely, a school principal in Tipperary town. ‘But for me, the focus has been on June 4 and this game. From our perspective, if you look at recent history between us and even over the past few decades, Clare and Limerick matches are always very tight affairs.
‘Even last year, when Limerick were perceived as not playing at their best, there was still only a couple of points in it. Clare have always found it difficult and Limerick always had opportunities to win those games. That’s the challenge for us. When we do get our purple patch, we need to make it count.’
Kiely has only been in the job a few months, but his straight-talking nature has already created an impression and he took some Limerick supporters to task for criticism levelled at his young team during the Munster senior league, although he now insists that particular incident was ‘a storm in a teacup.’
‘Sometimes you can be too honest but I generally call things as I see them. I think you will get found if you don’t do that. The players know we have huge regard for them. We are all in this together and there is a great sense of unity of purpose within the group.
‘We couldn’t have asked for a single iota extra from the players. There is huge team spirit there at the moment and great ambition within the group. But that doesn’t take away from the task that we have against Clare.’
As a member of the 1990s squad that came so desperately close to two All-Ireland titles, Kiely recalls, vividly, the titanic battles that Clare and Limerick had in that decade. Sunday might not reach those heights, but Kiely will be content if his team manage to win by the same narrow margin that Limerick did back in 1996 when Ciaran Carey famously had the final say.