*Photograph: Ruth Griffin.
A BETTER standard of refereeing is needed in hurling, Clare manager Brian Lohan has said.
Clare will meet championship favourites Limerick in the All-Ireland SHC semi-final on Sunday week but their place in the last four has come at a cost with David Reidy, Conor Cleary and David McInerney all leaving the field of play with injuries during Saturday’s thirteen point win over Dublin.
Reidy had to be stretchered off the field following a high challenge by Brendan Kenny which resulted in a straight red card for the Dublin substitute. It is the second head injury sustained by a Clare player in Thurles this season, Mark Rodgers only returned to competitive action after a month sidelined in the aftermath of a high tackle by Tipperary’s Willie Connors.
Discussing Reidy’s injury in Semple Stadium, Lohan stated, “No one wants to see that, no one wants to see a stretcher coming out and the game held up for that period of time. But we do have brilliant medical staff, an excellent doctor and he’s in good hands. So in the next couple of hours now we’ll see how he is and how bad he is or how good he is”.
More protection needs to be given to hurlers, particularly on the area of head injuries, he stressed. “I think over the last couple of years it was accepted that anything around the head was a straight red, but that seems to have slipped this year. Certainly we have suffered a number of injuries around the area of concussion, so it is something that the GAA are going to have to look at and our referees are going to have to look at”.
Not alone has the Cratloe resident raised the issue of refereeing in the media but he confirmed he has written to GAA chiefs in Croke Park on the subject. “Well, I’ve written to Croke Park on numerous occasions in relation to refereeing, in relation to incidents in games and I’m ignored, so I don’t know. Well I don’t know if I’m ignored but certainly I’m not getting any kind of satisfaction”.
Returning to winning ways was the main focus for Clare, their third championship win of the season puts them back in the All-Ireland semi-finals for the first time since 2024, a year that ended with Tony Kelly climbing the steps of the Hogan Stand to lift the Liam MacCarthy. “It was good to win, good to get the performance, patchy enough kind of a performance. [We] played well initially and then for the second quarter didn’t play so well and they came back into it with very little in it at half-time. And then I think the second half we used the ball way better than what we did in that second quarter and we pulled away and did the job that we had to do”.
Ball retention from puckouts was the main tactical concern for the two-time All-Ireland winner from the Dublin tie, “I think we struggled really badly on our own puck out in that second quarter and they got a good amount of scores from that so that’s an area that we have to work on obviously”.
