By Michael Devlin

Two Liam MacCarthy Cups and three Munster titles. Four All-Star awards, the most by any Clare hurler. Hurler of the Year in 1995, full-back on the Munster Team of the Millennium. That iconic red helmet, sans face guard, storming out of the defence with the sliotar clenched in hand.

These are the honours and hallmarks of Brian Lohan, the qualifications of a Clare hurling legend. But the man himself wouldn’t readily subscribe himself as a holder of such status. Instead he regards the great players he duelled with as his legends, the likes of Joe Cooney from Galway, Cork’s John Fitzgibbon, and Tipperary greats Nicky English and Pat Fox.

“They were the guys that when I started off, you most looked forward to playing against,” Lohan tells GAA.ie at the launch of the Bord Gáis Energy GAA Legends Tours.

“The structure of the time, we were only playing Munster Championship matches, and we didn’t get out of Munster that much in the early part, so those were the big players at the time, the guys who’d won the All-Irelands that you wanted to come up against. They were great players.”

From his own county, though, there is one name that Lohan throws out ahead of the rest when he thinks of the word ‘legend’. “Ger Loughnane. Brilliant, an absolutely brilliant, brilliant man.”

With Loughnane at the helm, Clare ended an 81-year wait for the Liam MacCarthy with victory over Offaly in the long hot summer of 1995. The trick was repeated two years later, and those pair of triumphs, along with Wexford and Offaly’s successes, formed part of a sequence of All-Ireland wins that marked a revolutionary decade in hurling.

For a few summers in the mid 1990’s the traditional hurling powers of Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary were supplanted by teams who had waited too long in the wings. For Lohan and his fellow Clare upstarts though, the Banner’s rise out of the wilderness was not a sudden one.

“Yeah, we had great times. It was great but at the time it was kind of expected. We thought we could do it, we thought we had a good team. We’d lost a couple of games in ’93 and ’94, and we lost a League final in ’95, but in all those games that we lost we found we let ourselves down in particular parts that we felt we could have done a bit better.

“We didn’t feel that the teams that beat us were way better than us, apart from maybe Tipperary in ’93. They were way better than us on the day but that was maybe because we were very young at the time. But we felt that we were always good enough, and that it was just a matter of time. If it didn’t happen in ’95, it was going to happen in ’96.

“In 1995 we’d big performances from certain guys. Seanie [McMahon] was excellent, Frank [Lohan], Dalo [Anthony Daly], [Ollie] Baker, really good performances from the guys around me on the field.”

Lohan concludes the role of the number three, the position he made his own, has changed massively since his playing days as he considers how hurling has evolved in the past few decades.

“Your specialist defenders in specialist positions seem to be gone out the window. Because there’s so much moving about of defenders, you have to be comfortable in the half-backline, in the corners, in full, in a number of different positions.

“What would have been alien would have been short puck-outs. I played for 14 years and never once did I get a short puck-out, and I don’t think anyone in the full-back line get a short puck-out. So that’s one aspect of the game now that’s changed completely.”

The Hurling Championship of recent years has certainly offered its fair share of thrills. Limerick memorably emerged from last summer’s helter-skelter season to claim Liam, and this season’s championship has begun in the same vein, with Tipperary and Cork the early forerunners. Lohan fully expects the exhilaration and drama to ramp up as the weeks roll on.

“It’s super. The Championship last year was excellent, and you were kind of thinking the games maybe weren’t going to be as good or as competitive as that, but the results we’ve had so far, Tipp have been excellent, and Cork have been really good.

“There are question marks over Limerick that weren’t there in the first game, but are there now. It’s a very interesting Championship, and there’s going to be more great games. I don’t think Galway looked great the last day, but Kilkenny do look good. I’d say it could be Kilkenny or one of the Munster teams for the All-Ireland.”