"When I look back at my time as a player and as a manager, that will always be among my greatest memories of that time because it had everything - all that story and history of the Munster finals and occasions - even though it was a semi-final, it was more like a final because of all the sideshows around it."
That was Ger Loughnane tonight as he spoke to Off The Ball about the rivalry between Clare and Limerick in the early to mid-90s, which culminated in an epic Munster semi-final in 1996.
The former Clare manager was on the losing side that day months after winning the All-Ireland, and remembered heading into the packed Limerick dressing room, only to see the opposition's hero of the hour Ciaran Carey "sitting down and I'm nearly sure he was smoking a cigarette" as he took questions from a journalist, before responding with a quip that sticks with Loughnane to this day.
Ger Loughnane in 1996 ©Lorraine O'SullivanINPHO
But he also remembered the words of his former player Anthony Daly in the aftermath: "Basically the tenor of his speech was that 'we were beaten today but if we never win a game again, we had the time of our lives last year' which is not what I wanted to hear because this was the start of the journey as far as I was concerned."
From his perspective, Loughnane wanted his Clare team to not settle for just one All-Ireland and one Munster championship in order to be "regarded as a team that would be a force".
"Being seen as a one-off All-Ireland winner, I thought would have really done a total injustice to the type of player we had at that time. So it was a lot different to any other defeat that I had," he said of the 1996 setback.
"So, maybe Ciaran Carey, by scoring that point, helped us winning the All-Ireland the following year."
Loughane also reminisced about the leaders within his Clare team and the factors which helped that generation to sustained success in that era.
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