A great insight into one of our greats hurling life here from Kieran Shannon in The Examiner

'If I was passing some field...I’d run in and hit 20 frees. Even in my 40s, I’d do that'

Niall Gilligan was front and centre for Clare hurling's good - and not so good - days. Thanks to the guidance of his old team mate, Brian Lohan, he detects a changing mindset in the county

He’s finally stopped even though he’s still constantly on the go.

When I manage to pin down Niall Gilligan for a spare half-hour he has between jobs, I get a bit of an exclusive beyond just what he as the last goalscorer on a Clare team that won a Munster final thinks about the latest edition of that celebrated fixture.

Turns out that after still playing with the county up to when he was 33, and still being around to win a seventh county championship with Sixmilebridge at 43, and still lining out with the junior Bs in their narrow county final loss to Scariff last autumn at 45, he’s at last actually hung up the boots.

“I left the [junior Bs’] WhatsApp group two weeks so I suppose that was enough to make it official,” he smiles. “I wasn’t going putting it on Twitter!”

Suffice to say though, he’s not suffering any crisis of identity or withdrawal symptoms. 

As he says himself, “I don’t miss it because I don’t really have time to miss it.”

For one, he’s still actively involved with the club, serving as a selector with the seniors. He runs his own auctioneering business. Owns a bar, Gilly’s, in his home village. With his father having passed away at the start of Covid, he’s helping out on the family farm more than ever. And on top of all that then there’s the three kids and the age they’re at. Running here and there to all the games they want to play. And with the way Clare are going now, all the games they want to see.

It means that this is only the second interview I’ve ever conducted in a car; the only previous occasion was 21 years ago when I was able to secure a rare audience with Ciarán MacDonald ahead of a shooting session he was getting in on his own down in the field in Crossmolina, the same month the mercurial Mayo man was leading his club to an All-Ireland title and Gilligan was blazing two goals past Limerick in a rare mid-week league game. 

Gilligan has had to leave his jeep in to be tested, so while he’s waiting, it’s a chance to chat to the Examiner fella living nearby and honour that interview commitment he’d promised earlier in the week.

It turns out that a bit like MacDonald, Gilligan himself liked to get in quite a bit of shooting, especially free-taking, on his own. In fact, he was a bit like Christy Ring by putting a bag of balls along with his hurley in the boot of the jeep in case he found there was a bit of spare time and a spare field on the road at work.

“If I was passing some field, say Broadford, on a Tuesday afternoon, I’d run in and hit 20 frees. Even in my 40s, I’d do that. Sure I had to.”

It wasn’t like he was a natural at the frees, or anything else at hurling for that matter. He never took the frees for the club at underage. He was a sub on the Clare team that won the U14 Tony Forristal all right and played some Dean Ryan hurling for St Flannan’s but never progressed to play Harty Cup for them or minor for Clare.

“I was relatively small in those years. And my mother died during that time too, so I lost my way a bit, which was only normal; of course a young fella of that age is going to find it tough, losing and missing their mother.

“But I never fell out of love with the game. I’d be hanging around at home with the likes of John Reddan and John O’Meara and Johnny Moroney, going to matches and talking about trying to win a minor championship. Then between the age of 17 and 18 I grew a foot. The club won the All Ireland and while I was only a sub all throughout Clare I came on in the All-Ireland final and did well enough to get called up onto the county U21s. Around that time I remember playing for DIT against [NUIG] in Dangan. We were getting hammered but I had scored about six points from play the same day and I suddenly had the thought: 'I’m actually getting pretty good at this'. A penny dropped. And I seemed to kick on from that.”

He volunteers all this – how he went from someone who never took the frees underage for his club to being the best in and for the county for almost two full decades – by ways of contextualising and celebrating the brilliance of Tony Kelly. Even someone who seems as natural a hurler as Kelly had to dig it out of the ground; about the only thing that’s natural in his equation is just how in synch he is with his environment, out there working on and honing his craft on that field in Ballyea all on his own.

“The frees he’s scoring now, they don’t just happen. I’d have said a few years ago that Tony wasn’t a good freetaker. But he’s almost flawless at them now. And that comes down to how hard he’s practised them. I used to do a lot of practise but from what I hear and from what I can see in matches the amount of practice he does on his own is unreal. After work or on a night Clare have off he’ll still be down in the field in Ballyea practising his frees. He’s really gone after them after the last few years because Clare needed a freetaker when the likes of Peter Duggan were away.”

Gilligan’s noticed another significant change and improvement in Kelly’s game the last few years: the licence Brian Lohan and his management have given him. A bit like Kelly on his own down in that field in Ballyea, he’s not so much a player as a kid; he’s not so much at work as at play. In previous years lining out with Clare could sometimes resemble a workplace or a classroom. Under Lohan it’s like as if a kid has been unleashed and let roam in his own playground.

“You can talk about strength and conditioning and how athletic a player might be but the number one attribute Tony Kelly has is his absolute love of hurling. And in a way one of the best bits of coaching Brian and his team have done is realising when and what they don’t have to coach. They’ve had the intelligence to say, ‘Let’s just let this fella off.’

“I remember a few years ago [seeing Kelly in a club match for Ballyea against O’Callaghan Mills down in Newmarket. He shot eight points and seven wides from play. Now, for any midfielder, 15 possessions alone is good going. He had 15 shots! And if it had been anyone else you’d say they should only have taken on a third of them. But how can you give out to a fella when he gets eight points from play?! And can do it routinely?

“That’s what Lohan has done. He’s identified Tony’s unique talent, watched how he plays with Ballyea, and basically given him a free role: Go find the ball and do what you like with it.

“And that’s across the board. The players all know Brian’s a legend of the game but that alone will only go so far, especially when a lot of the lads wouldn’t themselves have seen Brian play. But from what I’m hearing back is that the players are really loving and responding to the simplicity of his approach.

“No disrespect to some of the previous management teams, but the players now feel they’re allowed to hurl with more freedom than they were. There aren’t half the meetings or in-depth analysis as there would have been. The last game against Limerick in Cusack Park, they just fronted up and didn’t allow Limerick to go short with their puckouts. They consciously decided not to get too wrapped up in tactics the way Cork seemed to their first day out against Limerick. And it’s working for them.”

Gilligan knows Lohan better than most. They each work in the auctioneering game in their native county. Quite regularly Gilligan has to evaluate the price of a property that Lohan has on the books and so have to meet up and get the key off him. Those dealings are invariably amicable, which would be more than you could say about some of their interactions in Cusack Park behind closed doors quarter of a century ago. Back then Gilligan got to see that red wasn’t just the colour of Lohan’s famous helmet.

“I remember one evening when I wouldn’t have been on the panel long: I’d say it would have been April ’97. I was marking Brian in training and would already have copped that if you were soft with him he’d just mow you into the ground. You had to stand your ground against him. So this high ball was coming in and I was tussling with him. I must have ended up hitting him with my elbow into the nose but I only realised it a couple of minute later when I looked over at him. He was destroyed in blood. It was all over his jersey, all down his togs. And yet he was continuing as if nothing had happened. He was still just looking out the field, waiting for when the ball was going to come in and shouting out encouragement to lads.

“Today there’d have been an ambulance called. This was only a training match. But that’s Brian. He’d be mad driven at everything he applies himself to in life though he doesn’t bang his chest about it.”

Driving them all back in those days was Loughnane. While Gilligan was being introduced to Lohan’s kitchen, it was undoubtedly Loughnane’s house. The whole county at the time was Loughnane Country and never was that more evident than in the mad few weeks either side of the last provincial title the county won – the Munster final replay of ’98. Near the end of the game Gilligan broke through to fire in the goal that sealed the win but like everyone else he remembers more the prelude, start and aftermath of that match.

“Give Loughnane a ball of sliotars and 30 players and you’d have a great training session. Just the speed of it and intensity of it he’d create. You’d be playing a match and he’d be like Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh in the middle of the field, giving a sort of commentary. It would always be level or just a point in it; that’s what he’d keep saying anyway, that’s what he was steeling us for.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a dressing room or had a build-up to match where fellas were as cross with themselves as the Munster final replay of ’98 against Waterford. Everyone felt they had hurled poorly the first day and there was just this mad determination to make amends.

“I can remember going to training that week, I collected Christy Chaplin in the Bridge in plenty of time. But then when we called to get John Reddan, his mother said he’d been delayed at work so we had to drive over to Shannon Airport to collect him. By the time we got to Ennis there was a lot of traffic so we ended up being late for training. Well, Loughnane tore us to shreds. Looking back, it was funny but it wasn’t funny at the time. But I think it just gave him more cause and ammunition to frighten lads, to impress on us just how serious this was and how we’d to lay down a marker the next day.

“I was being marked by Brian Flannery. I suppose we tore into each other as well. Everyone was belting around the field. I remember my father, God be good to him, putting on the video of it and he’d be roaring laughing at Colin Lynch and Ollie Baker at that throw-in. Tony Browne wasn’t going to be man of the match that day and it was simple as that. Colin Lynch was going to make sure of that.

“Sure that was a mad time. I don’t know if we always look back on things through rose-tinted glasses but hurling back then seemed to mean everything to everyone. Just the all the talk and hype there’d be about it. I worked on the family farm all those summers and if Clare FM was on and Loughnane was being interviewed and we were outside doing something, my father would roar at us to come inside and you’d listen. It was everything.”

Yet that’s the beauty of a time and week like this. While there isn’t quite the madness of the Loughnane years, there’s a buzz and expectation about the place that you wouldn’t have had even when Gilligan was heading into an All Ireland final in 2002 or possibly even when the county won one outright in 2013. For Gilligan there’s just a momentum and fervour within the county that comes with the prospect of going through the frontdoor, winning Munster.

“To me there is a huge yearning there within the county [to win a first Munster final in 24 years], consciously or unconsciously. I know since then we won an All Ireland in ’13 and it was great but I think if Clare could win on Sunday it would be really special. Imagine the buzz you’d have around Ennis on the bank holiday Monday. And if they were to win it, I’d love, especially with there being a month’s break before the All Ireland semi-final, if there was an open day so the kids and supporters could interact with the players.

“Walking through the town [Ennis] for the Limerick game last month, it reminded me of the late ’90s again. Just the buzz around the place. And the young people are really getting into it. I went down on the train to the Cork match and I couldn’t get over the crowd on the platform and the amount of young people going to it. The train tickets for this game were sold out in minutes.

“You have to say Clare are underdogs. This is the best Limerick team ever, and if they win, they’re going to be challenging the great Kilkenny team of Shefflin and all the boys. But there’s such a momentum now with Clare and the team and the public are feeding off it. Anything is possible.”

The kid who couldn’t make a Harty Cup team but ended up being his county’s go-to freetaker and all-time leading goalscorer can testify to that.