By John Harrington

Clare joint-manager Gerry O’Connor would have liked if his team had closed the game out more comfortably than they did, but the final result was all that really mattered to him after the Banner County got the better of Limerick in today's Munster SHC Semi-Final.

Wins in the Munster Championship have been all too rare for the Clare senior hurlers in recent years, and qualification for the County’s first provincial Final since 2008 means a lot.

“We would have rathered it was a less stressful finish but ultimately the prize today for Limerick and Clare was huge,” said O’Connor.

“That's why at various stages we couldn't nail Limerick the way we want to in terms of closing out the gap to seven or eight points. Anytime that we did they clawed it back. The real positive aspect from our perspective was any time Limerick eroded our lead, our guys responded magnificently.

“I've been following Clare hurling as a supporter for a long time. There's something special about the Munster final, it's something that we're going to relish and something we're going to really focus on over the next four weeks.”

Two early goals from Shane O’Donnell got Clare off to a flier, and O’Connor was effusive in his praise for a player who is only just back from a knee injury.

“Shane O'Donnell has been in incredible form for the last 3 weeks,” said O’Connor. “We had an A and B game two weeks ago and Shane was just back from injury and he didn't make the A team and the response that he gave in that game meant he just could not but start.

“He was incredible and to be fair he's carried the form from the second half of the Eire Og game against the Mills right through. He's been in incredible form. Maybe died a bit out of it in the second half.

“We've a huge amount of work, we're definitely a work in progress, the amount of opportunities we created and the amount of possession we dominated and didn't convert into scores is a challenge for us for sure.”

Limerick manager John Kiely was proud of the effort his young team produced, but admitted they were their own worst enemies at times.

“We just left them have too big a gap at the outset, the first quarter to twenty minutes,” said Kiely.

“We made it too hard on ourselves, though we responded really well, we took the game to them and dominated there for maybe ten minutes, we closed the gap right up - it was eleven all at one stage.

“We would be very happy with that, probably felt we should have pushed on a bit more even just before the half-time break, because after coming back level, but Clare responded then, and that’s testament to their character as well, to respond when they’d been tested. They’d been in a very dominant position and left it slip.

“We played with the breeze in the first half as well, which probably encouraged our fellas to shoot a bit more from further out, and that cost us a few points, or definitely cost us in terms of better ball going into the full-forward line, which sapped our confidence a bit too.

“It was five at half-time and we pegged it back. We were very resilient, I thought, throughout the game, we never gave up, we kept going and going and going, even when it was four or  five points away we knew we were capable of getting a couple of scores.

“Hats off to our lads, they fought really hard and everyone contributed. Maybe we met a marginally better Clare team on the day, and had we been a little bit more efficient with our ball we could have put more of a squeeze on in that last quarter.

“It could have been a little bit closer, and it would have been interesting to see how that went then.”

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