People have been declaring themselves pleased for Brian Lohan, the taciturn Clare manager currently enjoying a run of form on the back of wins over Cork and Tipperary. The goodwill goes beyond his own county. Maybe because, like almost everything in his long career, the spell of recent prosperity has been hard earned.
ublic favour can be transient but there is a sense that this warmth towards Lohan essentially derives from a recognition of the immutable qualities of the person involved. Right now they just happen to have merged with some gratifying results. The wins are the icing on the cake.
“It is very simple,” says Ger Loughnane of the regard for Lohan. “He is genuine.”
In 2000, Loughnane stepped away as Clare’s most successful manager of all time. Lohan is their eighth manager since then, and the fifth from that era’s player pool, while the team’s two selectors have also had a turn. Plenty of candidates have had a shot, but it has taken time for Lohan to emerge and it was never what you would call a given. He turned 50 last November. Sometimes the opportunity doesn’t present itself. Even when Lohan started considering getting involved he wasn’t preoccupied with managing the team. If someone else would do it capably he was content to give a helping hand. Ego, then, was not a driving force behind his decision to manage Clare.
And that would seem to explain the public’s appreciation of him and his motives. “We live in an era where superficiality, fakery, and all that kind of stuff is so prevalent and people coming on and giving out sob stories about themselves just to gain popularity,” says Loughnane. “People know you’ll get none of that from Brian Lohan. What you’ll get is what Brian Lohan is. That’s the way he was as a player. That’s the way he is as a manager. It takes some people a while to recognise it I suppose.
“It’s very hard nowadays to recognise people who are genuine. And people who are not genuine. People who are fake. But when people see someone who is absolutely 100 per cent genuine they really take to that type of person, and rightly so.”
The current Clare hurlers are too young to have fully appreciated Lohan in his prime as a player, a county career that began in earnest in May 1993 when a coltish team under Len Gaynor ambushed the hot favourites Limerick in Ennis in a Munster quarter-final. From skinny corner-back he mushroomed into a towering full-back presence and legendary figure. You did not need to see him play in the flesh to appreciate the position and respect he commanded.
Cathal McInerney was born in 1991 and was just four when Lohan won the first of two All-Irelands in three years and helped shake the foundation of the old hurling traditions. When McInerney was a county minor in 2009, Lohan worked as a team coach. He had him as a coach in Cratloe in 2014, and in UL when they won the Fitzgibbon in 2015, and more recently with the Clare seniors as manager in 2020. Most of Lohan’s journey has been spent partly undercover, not front of house. Front of house is not his natural look.
“He is a guy who has huge respect throughout the country but in Clare especially,” says McInerney. “You hear of the ‘Brick flick’ after Michael ‘Brick’ Walsh. I suppose Brian Lohan would be known for the low catch, where you are not using the hurley but going down with the hand. In Clare that would be associated with Brian Lohan.”
What does he admire of him now? “First and foremost I would say his honesty. Players respect his honesty. If you are not making the team, you are told why you’re not making the team. If you are not making the 26, you are told why you are not making the 26. I don’t think he pulls any punches in that regard.”
Lohan has the same core principles today he had as a player. In 2015 he went public on his misgivings about the direction Clare hurling was headed. There were implicit criticisms of the power structure in Clare being too centralised and the system failing the players and future generations. It immediately marked him down as an enemy of the regime and almost sabotaged his chances of eventually becoming Clare manager.
“Yeah and a lot of us could be accused maybe of not speaking out in case of causing rifts,” says Anthony Daly. “I just thought he weighed up the warning signals and overall situation and thought someone has to say this. And he would be his own man. But that’s Brian. Didn’t make the Harty Cup team in his last year in school. So he knuckled down and next it was, ‘who is this fella playing Fitzgibbon?’”
Not making the Harty might be considered a relatively small bump on a long journey, compared to some of the roadblocks placed in his way since taking the position in 2019. The issues in Clare GAA governance have been well charted, structural and political rust that left the county trailing behind competitors, not least close neighbours Limerick. Lohan worked as a coach with Patrickswell in 2010 and ’11 and his proximity to Limerick, reared in Shannon, now resident in Cratloe, would have made that disparity sit even more uneasily with him.
The review he called for in 2015 eventually took place but his first year as manager was impacted by Covid and ongoing internal tension over gear shortages and playing facilities, with Caherlohan’s centre of excellence often deemed unsuitable and obliging the players to train elsewhere.
The first year he brought Clare to an All-Ireland quarter-final, where Tony Kelly, in inspirational form, got injured in the warm-up before they played Waterford. Last year brought the penalty controversy in the Tipperary match, and then a narrow defeat to Cork when Kelly had a chance to score a spectacular winning goal with seconds left. Loughnane talks of Lohan’s toughness in that period when he was fighting a war on two fronts.
Why would be put up with it? The most obvious answer is because he believed, in his heart, that there was something that fundamentally needed to be addressed and that complaining from the bar stool was not going to change it. So like the Harty, you went out and worked as hard as you could to change things. You couldn’t do it all so you surrounded yourself with the people who had the same values. If there were attempts to undermine his management of the team, he kept his powder dry.
“He never seemed to complain or moan,” says McInerney. “I don’t think he came out and said anything. People appreciated that because he wasn’t making excuses. He could have had 15 or 16 different excuses but he never fell back on that.”
The project has been steadily building and this year the pieces have started to fall more neatly into place, aided greatly by the return of Shane O’Donnell and Peter Duggan, with the recall of Aidan McCarthy to training after injury a further boost. It has eased the reliance on the talismanic Kelly, without diminishing him.
In both matches Clare have played with a buoyancy and industry that speaks of a strong bond and morale. “If you look at two years ago, Limerick scored 36 points against them and he saw the defence was a problem and in an effort to address that he has four new defenders and brought back John Conlon,” says Loughnane. “He has that clarity of thinking. He had that in business as well. He has a clarity of thinking that comes about because of his calmness. He is doing it for the right reason. The right reason is so that it gives you a chance to win.
“You see, Brian is a very simple guy. It is the fact that it is based on such genuineness and such consistency. That is his strength. And players mightn’t have taken to that originally. Especially players that were there with different managers down the years. But now I think they get a security from that. Knowing that if they put in an effort it will be rewarded.
“As well as that a sincere person will surround himself with sincere people. You won’t get more sincere than Seán Treacy. He is an absolutely fantastic guy. Seán Treacy is a rock solid person who is in it for the right reasons. Ken Ralph is the very same way. I don’t know James Moran, so I can’t comment on James.
“Gus [Lohan’s father] had that as well. Gus was the same way. The Lohans, they don’t get over-excited even though he would be savagely driven of course, savagely driven to succeed. But no outward manifestation, he doesn’t need to have any outward expression of that.”
Expression is for the field of play. Players have demonstrated an appetite to leave a serious mark, even if Limerick are out in front of the chasing pack and will present their most formidable challenge in Ennis this afternoon. When Lohan’s Clare played Limerick in 2020, Tony Kelly scored 0-17 but they still lost the match by 10 points. They will expect to have closed the gap in the time since with a greater spread of scoring responsibilities and a stronger backline and bench.
“You only have to look at the way Kelly has played,” says Daly, speaking of Lohan’s connection to the players. “Kelly has never played better. Bar 2013. He has never been more consistent, as reliable, even when he’s out of a game, he’s doing seven or eight great things, even if quiet from play. We all know he created the space for some of the goals. I think that is a real sign of things.
“He [Lohan] had success with some (players) with UL. A lot of the newer lads wouldn’t really have known him, he wasn’t involved with them at underage. Lohan is iconic from our team. I would have said the greatest of them all that we ever saw for Clare. I would still probably have him ahead of Kelly in terms of absolute influence on a team. Sure these young fellas, their fathers and uncles and even their mothers, must have been saying, ‘jeez ye have some man coming now’.”
Gary Kirby faced Lohan directly on the field in the 1990s and then joined forces when Lohan worked as a coach with Patrickswell for two years with Kirby as manager. They lost a county semi-final to Na Piarsaigh in 2011, having led by six points at half-time. “He’s brought back that bite that he had as a player,” says Kirby. “It’s the likes of what Cork are missing, that bit of bite you see in Clare and Limerick. You wouldn’t have players coming back if they weren’t happy with what Brian is doing, if they weren’t behind him.”
Two home games conclude the round robin stages of the championship for Clare, starting today against Limerick, and Waterford coming to Cusack Park in a week, creating huge anticipation and with optimism growing after improved performances by their underage sides. At some point, when the county was struggling and being left behind Lohan was one of the people who shouted stop.
Loughnane says that “consistency of behaviour” is a Lohan hallmark. “That’s what players need, they love consistency. That has been the real trait of Brian Cody as well, the consistency of his behaviour and his beliefs over such a long period of time. He [Lohan] won’t do anything out of vindictiveness, he won’t do anything to gain popularity. He’ll do it because he believes it is the right thing to do.”
Which leads him back to where we began, Loughnane seeing Lohan as an antidote to a world burdened by more than it’s fair share of charlatans. “So when people see someone who is completely genuine and doing things for exactly the right reasons, which is for his own team, they want to show that person that they recognise what he is doing,” Loughnane says, explaining why he has the goodwill of so many.
It’s that simple? “It’s that’s simple.”
And the motive is no less complicated. “His motivation,” says Loughnane, “was he thought he could do something for the team if he was in charge of the team. That if he had time to try and save it, really because it was going down the Swanee, the whole hurling scene in Clare. He felt, I would say, that it was the responsibility of someone to take it on. There was nobody putting their head above the parapet so he decided he would do it.”
Twenty five years after winning his second and last All-Ireland medal, 20 years after captaining Clare in an All-Ireland final, he is still rising some dust.
