*Photograph: Ruth Griffin
HOME VENUES have been made “a fortress” by Clare’s senior camogie side who line out in their final group game of the National Camogie League this Saturday.
Unbeaten in their four games to date, Clare look to see out the group stages with a win over Offaly in Zimmer Biomet Páirc Chíosóg.
Eugene Foudy has put an emphasis on different areas since taking the reigns as senior manager. Among those is ensuring nothing is given away easy in their home games.
He explained, “We didn’t do ourselves justice against Limerick, three tough games in three weeks so we had two weeks to recover, we were carrying a few knocks so we knew Down would be tough. As I said to the girls before the Wexford game, any game we play in Clare, this is going to be a fortress, no one will come in here and take points off us easily, that was our message to the girls and that is what we did”.
Fitness has been another focus with Clare bouncing back after conceding 1-1 in their fourth round win over Down to emerge victorious on a score of 3-18 1-9 with goals from Ellen Casey, Maeve Millea and Áine O’Loughlin.
“Our fitness, to be fair to Trevor and Darragh, we’ve huge work done on fitness and it was one of my goals when I took over was to make sure fitness was improved because we have the skill levels which has been proven down the years with Inagh/Kilnamona, Truagh/Clonlara and Scariff/Ogonnelloe all good players, we wanted to work on our fitness, we have that down. We scored 0-14 against the breeze, 0-11 from play so you have to be happy with that,” Foudy said.
Spreading game time amongst the entire panel has been an objective for their final two rounds. “You have to keep the panel happy, they will all be buzzing at getting the game time. The girls love coming training, to get other girls on the panel or the fringe players game time is important because they train just as hard”.
All photographs by Ruth Griffin.
