Between 1993 and 2003, Tipperary and Clare met 10 times in the championship. Tommy Dunne and James O’Connor, key men for their respective counties, reflect on a sometimes bitter enmity
Dunne had no desire to look away. He found a picture of the six Clare backs and placed it on the floor of his gear bag. Every time he reached for his gear, those were the faces staring back at him.Dunne’s championship debut came against Clare in 1994; by then, James O’Connor was a second-year veteran. In the previous year’s Munster final Clare had been eviscerated by Tipp, beaten by six goals in the Gaelic Grounds.
As the relationship evolved, and the tension escalated, matches between Clare and Tipp assumed a Hunger Games quality. In the early years, especially, it didn’t even need to be a championship match for one crowd or the other to use the fixture as a makeshift hustings – in order to say something in public. O’Connor remembers Tipp coming to Ennis for a League game in 1995 and Ger Loughnane massaging it into something momentous in their dressingroom. He had that power over them.
“There was no words spoken. That was it. I knew it was time to get out of town. That was a battle I wasn’t going to win so I had to cut my losses and move on. I’m talking about myself starting out, trying to be a good player for Tipp, but in the Tipp psyche as well, if you were inferior against Clare in the physicality stakes it was going to be very, very difficult to compete. They were in superb condition, they were big men and they were aggressive.
Tommy Dunne evades the challenge of Clare's Brian Lohan during the 1997 Munster Senior Hurling Championship final. Photograph: Lorraine O'Sullivan/Inpho The margin at the end couldn’t have been smaller. Between Clare and Tipp, though, everything was magnified. In the space between winning and losing was an abyss. One of them had to fall.“That game was ferocious,” says Dunne, “just ferocious. Intense, physical – but yet you could hurl in it. I was marking [Ollie] Baker. Just ferocious. You knew you had to be razor sharp because the margins for error against them – you weren’t going to get a second bite of the cherry.
“But when you allow yourself time – where I am now – to think about it for a few minutes, they were huge events in your life. 1997 hurts so bad, but I love the fact that I was right in the middle of it.”How far could they push each other? Who would crack? At the heart of it was plain, primitive machismo. For shame, nobody could blink. Weakness was vilified and fatal.
Ger Loughnane eventually stepped down from his position as Clare manager, but fixtures between the two counties remained fierce affairs. Photograph: Lorraine O'Sullivan/Inpho “Then Dickie [Murphy, referee] threw the ball in to start the game. Myself and [Colin] Lynch were there and Baker and [Conor] Gleeson were there, and if you watch the throw-in, it’s manic. Lynch pulls about a mile over the ball – no free. The ball goes behind us and I just turned and whaled into him. I broke Lynch’s hurley and Dickie gives a free to Clare. And Seánie [McMahon] sticks it over the bar [laughs]. That was the way it was.
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