“We really felt we were on the cusp of a great time. There was real buy-in from people around the county. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since. You had the seniors, and you had the 21s, and our style of play, the exciting nature of the play, the intensity of the play. It was a phenomenal time.”
“I remember we had the cup on the minibus, but when the recovery session was done we were pretty much home to bed.” “To have Colm and Tony and David Mc and Podge and Shane O’Donnell to come so quickly, and to have such a major impact on how you played – the free-flowing nature of their hurling, their carefree attitude. It rubbed off on us all. To have one-third of the team that started the All-Ireland final to be under-21 was kind of crazy, but it was kind of infectious.”
“You could see straight away they were so comfortable [at senior level],” says Donal Tuohy, the former Clare goalkeeper. “That’s the one thing that stood out to me.” “There was a process of expectations because of what we’d won, and we knew that was going to be the case. You were expecting under-21 winners to win senior championships and for one reason or another it didn’t unfold like that. It just didn’t happen.”
Along the way, they all had different stories: injuries, distractions, other priorities, dips in motivation and form. Collins spent some time just playing for the footballers; then he tried to be a dual player; eventually he stepped away. “The same with Peter Duggan. His development came a lot later too. Paul Flanagan was a freak in the sense that it was a long time after the under-21s when he nailed down a spot.
Many of them landed in UL at the same time, and others followed. Some of them lived together. Flanagan shared a house in Castletroy with five other hurlers, all of whom had played for the Clare Under-21s.“It’s funny, even WhatsApp groups that you’d have now, or friends groups that you’d have now, are intertwined with hurling and under-21 squads and college. We’ve experienced an awful lot together so you’ve a lot of reference points.
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