YOU WILL KNOW a man like Brian Lohan by the anecdotes they tell about him.
Brian Lohan the player. Brian Lohan the coach. Brian Lohan the manager.
Doesn’t matter what role he performs for Clare. The image never alters.
Wearing that famous fire-engine red helmet, parked in and patrolling the area in front of old friend and now foe Davy Fitzgerald as they won two All Ireland titles.
The spells of coaching when he was dipping his toes into the world of cones and bibs, conditioned drills, guided discovery and blowing the pea out of the whistle.
The man on the line rolling the dice and making the calls, hunched over slightly, trouser legs pulled up and bunched in his fists resting just above the knees in a half-squat.
He oozes the stillness, something of the cool intimidation even, of an Easter Island statue.
Take the 1995 season, when manager Ger Loughnane and team trainer Mike McNamara were putting the players through a constant purgatory in trying to win an All Ireland.
In the All Ireland semi final against Galway, Lohan was marking the legendary Joe Cooney. His hamstring went and Cooney took a couple of points off him. Loughnane went down the sideline to diagnose the problem and emptied his belly to Lohan, who then proceeded to play out of his skin.
He didn’t call for the physio. He didn’t play up to the crowd with any heroic limping. He got on with it.
And then, the final against Offaly. With 20 minutes left he really did it this time. Loughnane’s selector Colm Flynn said to Loughnane, “Jesus, his hamstring is gone”.
According to Loughnane in his autobiography ‘Raising The Banner,’ the response was gruff. ‘Tell him he’s not fucking coming off,’ was Loughnane’s response.
As if to emphasise the point, he turned his back and marched in another direction. Flynn went in to tell Lohan. Lohan didn’t let on anything was wrong and didn’t make any reaction to Flynn’s message. He just drove on.
“When you talk about mental toughness,” wrote Loughnane, “what Lohan did in the All Ireland final was out of this world. It would never happen in soccer, the stretcher is brought in and there is a big exit. In the last 20 minutes he used his head, stayed goalside of John Troy and whoever else came on him and played away with a torn hamstring.
“He wasn’t able to train for three months afterwards. For those last 20 minutes, he held out by sheer guts. For a Clare player to do that in an All Ireland final was incredible and said everything about the difference between the team I played on and the team I managed.”
Let’s do a quantum leap right to his post-playing days, and Lohan and Jamesie O’Connor sat down with Marie Crowe 20 years after their second All Ireland to reminisce on those times.
For Clare, chasing Tipperary was everything that season. They saw them off in the Munster final but they hadn’t a chance to hammer the stake through their heart, so they met again in the All Ireland final.
Lohan recalled: “They had hammered us in 1993, 3-27 to 2-12, they gave us a hiding, and when you are growing up you remember hidings. It knocked us back but it didn’t keep us down. We were on our way and we had them in our sights.
“Even when we were playing challenge matches against them they never played their best team, they’d leave off (Pat) Fox and (Nicky) English so you never got the chance to mark Fox and English. It was as if we weren’t good enough, that they didn’t need to play them. And even though we had won the All-Ireland in 1995 and they hadn’t won since 1991, we wanted them.”
Heading into the 1997 All Ireland final, a sustained period of rain left Cusack Park sopping in late August. So eight days before the final, Loughnane brought them to the Gaelic Grounds for a full-on, full-throated 15-on-15 game.
In Jamesie O’Connor’s recollection, he was in his best shape and playing the best hurling of his life. He was already on six points from play and at the very end got another chance.
Sent it wide. Not to worry.
Only it was then that Lohan ran across the pitch, around 30 yards, to eat O’Connor about it. The carelessness of it all. How those chances have to go over.
“I remember thinking at the time, ‘oh would you go away’,” said O’Connor. “But going home in the car I was reflecting on it and I realised he was right and I often say it to lads in the school that it did get me thinking. And then I got a chance late on in the final . . .
“That just showed his mindset. You couldn’t afford any carelessness, any lapse in concentration. It happened 20 years ago and I still remember it. He didn’t have to do it or say it but he did and he did it for the right reasons.”
There’s another line in Anthony Daly’s autobiography, ‘Dalo’, concerning the moment when Loughnane decided they needed a change of captaincy after eight years of Daly leading the team out. Who else would get it, but Lohan?
“Lohan was a massive leader for us,” wrote Daly. “Pound for pound, he was the best player I ever played with. Any time he would clear a ball, it was like another fella clearing three balls. The crowd went crazy.”
As a child in those crowds, Cathal McInerney loved the roars and craic waiting for Lohan to make his interventions.
“When he was coming out for the ball, ‘the low catch’ was famous in Clare. It was similar to the ‘Brick Flick’ with Michael Walsh in Waterford. The Lohan low catch used to get all the ‘Aboy Lohan!” cheers in Clare,” he recalls.
When he progressed enough through juvenile hurling with Cratloe, McInerney was selected for the Clare minors in 2009.
It was the duo of Donal Moloney and Gerry O’Connor who was the management, but they brought an alpha along with them to blow the whistle – sparingly – and that alpha was Lohan.
At the time, Lohan was serving his coaching apprenticeship. McInerney was in school at Ardscoil Rís in Limerick and some of his classmates from Patrickswell would spend the first class on a Monday regaling everyone with the stuff Lohan was saying, the stuff Lohan was doing, in their own club training.
“Well, he’s an iconic figure in Clare. You’d be excited,” says McInerney.
His own involvement with Lohan then spread into all areas of his hurling life. Lohan was living in Cratloe and so it was inevitable he would coach them. They won the Clare championship in 2014.
Once the initial glow wore off, they found a man so straight you could have played handball off him.
“He had no bones about telling you if you weren’t performing to the level you should have been.
“When he was involved in Cratloe, he would have put the onus on the senior lads who were on the county panel, that they should be winning the games and the rest would follow.”
When McInerney went to University of Limerick, Lohan was his manager. Another step along the way. Another chance to come face to face with all sorts of scenarios and difficulties.
In UL, he had a squad packed with county players in the middle of National league campaigns. Anyone on those panels was not expected to train with the college. But they were expected to be present at the training and be sources of positive energy around the group.
For that sacrifice, Lohan would have had a squad of masseurs on hand to give them a rub-down. They won the Fitzgibbon Cup in 2015.
“He’s good craic. He is droll. There’s that perception there, but a lot of managers cannot be seen to let their guard down. Especially in GAA circles anyway,” says McInerney.
“You can have a bit of craic with Brian. He coached us in Cratloe when we won the double in 2014. We were out celebrating one night and some of the lads were naming the best hurlers in the country. Would you be able to mark this fella, Brian?
“And he would have come out with these one-liners, ’Sure I’d mark him on one leg.’
‘That boy? Easy meat for me.’”
In getting here, to the All Ireland final, nothing has been simple for Lohan.
For some coaches, the most discomfort they might experience would be breaking in new boots as they oversee sessions facilitated and organised by a team of eager helpers.
Lohan didn’t have that. The politics of Clare GAA has been tricky and messy.
Training venues moved around the Crusheens, Wolfe Tones, Tubbers with regularity impossible to achieve. That all fell to Lohan. He accepted that hardship, insisted on it.
Anything he got, he worked for it. And here he is, back in an All Ireland final.
Shaped by adversity, shaped by the hill in Shannon, by the voices of Loughnane and Mike Mac barking in the darkness.
Onto the political wars, the fall-outs with old comrades and the walls of distrust of everyone outside the group.
To this point. Where his popularity remains undimmed and higher than ever. With more heights to scale.
