This article is from page 95 of the 2008-04-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 95 JPG
AT LAST, the script changes. It’s been a tough old time not only for Frank Doherty, but also for the small knot of hacks who follow his team around. So far, the posse has been looking for new ways to ask the same old post-game question. “Where did it go wrong, Frank?’ has been our opener for the last two months.
On Sunday, things were different. It was time to address the positives.
“Wicklow are a nice county team, probably on a par with ourselves,” Doherty says from under the Cusack Park stand. “Forget about London and Kilkenny — no disrespect to ei- ther of them — but this was a solid county team today and we had to step up to the mark. So I’m happy, delighted to get the win to be honest because I knew we had to score well and we had to up the intensity.
“I’m tired of saying it but we have a young team and there were a couple of lads out injured again today. But it was great to see the likes of David Russell coming back. He gives that bit of experience and is a help to
those young lads. At the start of the league I looked at Wicklow and said this was a game that we had to win if we had any aspirations at all. It was a game I targeted.
“We had David [Russell] back which was a boost – he’s been a great asset to Clare football down through the years and looking forward, we’ll need the likes of him to help the young lads progress. And Niall [Considine — also back from suspen- sion] had a good first half as well.”
Already, there are other targets on the horizon and there are stepping stones to get Clare there. The first arrives, Doherty says, with Offaly’s visit in a fortnight.
“Offaly will be another challenge, that’s for sure. They’re the serious team in this group, along with An- trim.
“The two of those will be battling it out to win the division. Offaly is a step up, but today’s win was im- portant because winning becomes a habit. As does losing.
“But against Offaly we have to stand up and be counted. If we can get a good result it brings us into the
London game and then it’s just a cou- ple of weeks to the Waterford cham- pionship match.”
For afew minutes, it looked like this win could have been placed in doubt as a result of Ger Quinlan’s sending off, but according to the manager, the mental strength of Clare to come through what could have been a diffi- cult quarter of an hour was pleasing.
“I didn’t see the sending off, I was doing something else at the time, but once Ger [Quinlan] was gone, we worked damn hard and showed some good initiative. There was a lot of determination there to win the ball and that possibly wasn’t there a few weeks ago.
“IT definitely think this win 1s a shot in the arm for the lads and hopefully it’s going to put them in a positive frame of mind. We’ve worked hard in training over the past two weeks, something we couldn’t do with the seven games we had before this one and we stayed the full 70-minutes to- day, which was great.”
He walks off into the dressing room, out of the rain. A smile on his face for the first time in some while.