WHEN Cork played Clare in a League game in Ennis in April 2005, Davy Fitzgerald was going out with a ball when he was nailed with a challenge.
As Fitzgerald was lying prone on the ground, face stuck into the turf, Brian Lohan was standing over him, using his hurley in his right hand as a crutch to bend down to check on Fitzgerald’s welfare.
Lorraine O’Sullivan of Inpho captured the moment perfectly. Lohan had his hand on Fitzgerald’s back. He was clearly asking the goalkeeper about his wellbeing but Lohan would also have seen it as a personal affront that the goalkeeper behind him, and the guy he had an undeclared responsibility to protect, was injured on his watch.
By that stage, the pair had developed a unique goalkeeper-full-back relationship, a telepathic understanding that can only be honed through time and experience. By 2005, Lohan and Fitzgerald were in their 13th season together on the team, their 12th as the goalkeeper-full-back combination after Lohan moved from corner-back to take ownership of the full-back jersey at the outset of 2004.
As that number one and number three combination, Fitzgerald and Lohan played in five Munster finals, two League finals, seven All-Ireland semi-finals and three All-Ireland finals together.
On the greatest Clare team of all time, Fitzgerald and Lohan are still regarded as two of greatest players to ever play in their position.
The modern game has a different set-up now in that defenders can be deployed in any number of positions, but in the storied history of goalkeepers and their full-backs, Fitzgerald and Lohan will always be to the forefront in the mind’s eye of the hurling public.
In the 50-year history of the Allstars, the goalkeeper and full-back spots have gone to players from the same county nine times. Fitzgerald and Lohan are the only combination to do it twice.
When players retire and go back to their daily lives, they naturally drift from the team-mates and a time in their lives when the bond in the dressing room was as strong as that of a band of brothers. That bond is always there, but it doesn’t necessarily mean lifelong friendships.
For most of the group, the connection remains through the kind of slagging on WhatsApp groups that used to entertain them in the dressing room. For Lohan and Fitzgerald though, that link and association has long ceased.
When they meet on the sideline on Saturday evening, Lohan as Clare manager, Fitzgerald as Waterford manager, there will be no handshake before or after, no silent acknowledgement of what they once had together.
Shortly after Lohan was appointed Clare manager at the end of 2019, a mutual friend of his and Fitzgerald’s tried to act as an intermediary to see if something could be done to rebuild old bridges long blown to pieces. It never happened.
In 2020 and 2021, Lohan and Fitzgerald met on four occasions in League and Championship, Lohan as Clare manager, Fitzgerald as then Wexford manager, and each time, the pair went their separate ways
at the final whistle without exchanging the normal pleasantries of inter-county managers.
How did it come to this? According to Fitzgerald in his second book, the breakdown first began in 2014 when they came face-to-face in the Fitzgibbon Cup quarter-final in UL, when Lohan was manager of UL while Fitzgerald was over LIT.
LIT were underdogs and Fitzgerald pulled a few tricks beforehand to try and get under UL’s skin, emerging en masse from the bushes after the bus pulled up on the road just beyond UL’s main pitch.
UL had their cones laid out. LIT warmed up on that side of that field. The warm-up was chaos. Lohan was furious, especially after LIT won.
“Brian never came near me afterwards,” wrote Fitzgerald. “I didn’t need to be told he was absolutely bulling. When the dust had settled a couple of months later, I decided to ring Lohan.”
By Fitzgerald’s account, the call didn’t end well.
“It was at this point that he made a comment to me I have no intention of ever repeating,” wrote Fitzgerald.
If Fitzgerald had no intention of repeating the comment why did he mention it in the book? Why did he invite readers to imagine what Lohan might have said?
In any case, matters got worse.
At the end of the 2015 season Lohan urged the Clare County Board to conduct a review of the senior team’s performance, articulating a view that was widely held within the county. Fitzgerald took it to be a direct swipe at him and his father, the former long-standing county secretary Pat Fitzgerald, and gave Lohan a piece of his mind.
The acrimony dragged on in many different forms.
In 2016 Lohan was incensed when Fitzgerald insisted that UL players train with Clare 48 hours before a Fitzgibbon Cup match and Tony Kelly suffered an ankle ligament injury that sidelined him for weeks.
Fitzgerald had his say about it all in his book, whereas Lohan has said very little on the matter in public, apart from a couple of comments here and there.
“I don’t know if it’s genuine passion,” replied Lohan once when asked about Fitzgerald’s sideline persona as Wexford manager.
“We’re all passionate about the game, but we don’t... we show it in different ways.
“He has the way he does things and people have to kind of fit into that. But I think some of the antics, they’re not great.”
The whole saga has dragged on ever since, mostly off the pitch, especially as Lohan had to deal with Fitzgerald’s father on a host of side-issues while he was still Clare secretary before stepping away last year. On the pitch though, Lohan has got the better of Fitzgerald the last two times they have met in Championship, with Clare beating Wexford in 2020 and 2021.
After Wexford’s 2021 Qualifier defeat to Clare, Fitzgerald said that if someone arranged a meeting between him and Lohan to try and mend those broken bridges, that he would be more than willing to meet with Lohan. The meeting never happened.
The sub-plot will continue again on Saturday when Lohan and Fitzgerald meet again on the sideline in Thurles.
