Cunningham not caught up in the past as Clare U20s prepare to write their own story

*Odhran Cunningham. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill

NOW in his third year on the Clare U20 football panel, Odhran Cunningham will play as many championship games at the grade in 2024 as he has over the past two seasons.

This year the U20 football championship is no longer knockout meaning Clare are guaranteed three games in phase one plus at least one more game whether it is the B final at a worst case scenario or else they will be progressing to phase two of the competition.

Odhran was wing-back on the side in 2022 and found himself in the attack last season. This year he now has the additional role of serving as joint captain alongside Josh Moloney of Kilmurry Ibrickane. “It is not a huge change to be honest, we’ve a good leadership group of five or six lads that are helping myself and Josh along very well, there’s so many players that are in their second year so it’s fine, even the new lads coming in this year are brilliant leaders on the pitch too”.

He continued, “I wouldn’t put any extra effort into it, I’ve been doing the same thing as before I was asked by Mikey (Neylon) to do the captaincy, what I was doing beforehand I presume was enough to give me the role, maybe beforehand I was doing it already”.

In 2020 he was wing back on the Clare minor side defeated by Kerry in the Munster final while last season he was involved as the Kingdom just edged them in extra time in the U20 semi-final.

Living just a kilometre from the ferry in Killimer, he can view the football heartland in Kerry but those outings have given him the confidence that Clare are every bit as good as the province’s standard bearers. “You’d have to respect any team such as Kerry, their history speaks for itself but in any game we’ve played against them we have been reasonably competitive and we’ve been able to match them in a lot of aspects of the game so we can take confidence from that”.

A second year construction management and engineering student at UL, Odhran told The Clare Echo, “This panel is a young panel compared to the other ones I’ve been on, it’s been fairly good, there’s a lot of drive in the young lads, it is their first year and they are fresh, their freshness would rub off on a lot of other lads too, there’s very good confidence in the group and like any other team I’ve been on you have to be confident in your own self”.

Waterford are first up for Clare and while the Déise have proven very tricky at this grade away for home, including the 2021 quarter-final, Cunningham insisted that past encounters don’t form part of the equation this weekend. “This team is its own team, past teams have been their own team too, it is another game like any other challenge game we’ve played throughout the year, you can’t look to the past too much because we might get caught up in that or previous results”.

Five of the starting team from last year’s U20 semi-final have progressed to Mark Fitzgerald’s senior squad, with many added to the panel by Colm Collins following the conclusion of their campaign last April. The chance to progress up the ranks is not in the immediate thoughts of Odhran or his teammates, “At the moment you’re not really thinking about that because we have three fairly tough games guaranteed coming up with the U20s so we’re focusing on that at the moment, after that whatever comes up is based on your performance and if the team is doing well we’ll have a better chance so we’ll have to focus on that firstly”.

While he is situated one kilometre from Killimer Ferry Terminal, a kilometre from the Cunningham home in the direction is the football field and he rejoins the county squad off the back of his club winning the Junior A title last season. He reckoned he is caught in “a tiebreaker” with St Breckan’s Padraig O’Dwyer and Oisin McNamara of Michael Cusacks for the longest trek to county training.

For Saturday’s trip to Waterford, Clare will be without a considerable base of supporters given the avoidable clash with the senior’s league tie against Antrim. Taking care of their own business is the focus for the U20s who will hope to avail of a larger following for the second round in Quilty on Saturday week. “We have to look after ourselves first, I’d be wrong if I said none of the lads have any interest in the senior game, we’ll all be looking for the result after our game but firstly we will focus on ourselves and after that hopefully the two teams can come out with a win”.