Kieran Shannon interview: Opportunity knocks again for last man standing Eibhear Quilligan

“Playing for Clare hadn’t even been in my mind. I won’t say I had given up on it but I felt my chance had gone. That might sound a bit mad for a 25-year-old to have been thinking that way but that’s how I felt.” 

From his experience of managements, they tended to look at whoever was coming through from the U21s for any potential new panellists. When he was on the U21 panel for three years he was never played. So after seeing the text he decided he’d say nothing about it to the lads for at least an hour. Wait for the tell: a giddy glance, a leading query if there was any craic or word from home.

But it never came. It dawned on him. The text and invite had been genuine. A reply to and from Lohan confirmed as much. Quilligan barely took a drop for the rest of the trip.

“I was thinking, ‘This is my one shot now. If I take it I’ll probably stay on the panel for the year.’ That was my aim. There were four goalies in there at the time and my goal was to become number three. I ended the year as number one.” 

It’s where he has stayed ever since; in Lohan’s five years over Clare, Quilligan has started in all but one of their 30 championship games. There was something about Quilligan’s route and character as much as his game that appealed to Lohan who himself was overlooked by Clare for a large stretch of his underage career. His resilience, self-reliance, diligence, graft, humility. Everything he has done he has had to earn and grind for it.

Growing up in Feakle, the home of Clare’s first two All Stars in Ger Loughnane and Seamus Durack, he was always going to hurl, but it wasn’t as if as a young fella he aspired or envisaged being another Durack; instead he played out the field, around midfield, just like his uncle Val Donnellan.

By his teens though he found himself drawn to the goals. That’s where so many of the game’s big personalities at the time played. Fitzgerald. Fitzhenry. Cusack. Cummins. In his Junior Cert year he read Christy O’Connor’s Last Man Standing, the classic book on that golden generation of goalkeepers, several times over.

“I should have been studying instead,” he smiles. Only he was.

“I loved how they all looked at things differently and how you could take something from them all. Brendan Cummins would use really heavy sliotars to help improve the distance on his puckouts so I tried that. You had Donal Óg then being more refined with his puckout, Fitzy’s fire, Fitzhenry’s shot-stopping. It was a different time and the game has changed so much you but can still learn a lot from what they all did so well.” At minor he played in two All-Ireland semi-finals but then hit a wall.

In other sports, in other positions, minutes are split, shared. In goalkeeping it’s invariably all or nothing. In three years with the U21s Quilligan in championship got nothing. Not a single second. While it said something about him that he was asked back each year and that he went back each year, Ronan Taaffe from Tubber and then a Keith Hogan from Clooney-Quin were preferred over him. Neither went on to play senior championship for Clare but it wasn’t as if Quilligan could complain: Clare under the management of Donal Moloney and Gerry O’Connor won two All-Irelands in those years to go with another in 2012.

“I struggled at the time. I trained really hard and was happy how I conducted myself so externally others might say I dealt with it well but internally I didn’t. I’d leave training sessions very frustrated, feeling I was playing well but still wasn’t been picked.” Playing Fitzgibbon under Fitzy in LIT helped ease the pain and raise his game. “I really enjoyed that, learning tactically from Fitzy. Hurling was beginning to change, it was becoming more possession-based. It wasn’t just a matter of going long all the time, it was about being able to find players going short, and that was something he got me to focus on.

“It was easy to bounce stuff off him and what you could improve and what you were doing well. And he opened my eyes to the level of intensity that was required. Just putting that more time and detail into it. Like getting to the wall ball more, or getting Shane McGrath in the club to take more shots outside or after training with you.

“But then there was a year or two I wasn’t involved in any squad other than Feakle. And then in 2017 we got relegated. Clarecastle beat us by 13 points in the playoff. And Jesus, the dressing room afterwards that day in Tulla was an awful place. The toughest one I’ve ever been in.

“It probably changed me as a hurler. It wasn’t that I was the reason we were well beaten but I just felt I could have given more during the year. There were training sessions I missed when I found a poor excuse. It might only have been five sessions but they were five that I could have made. I might have been up in Dublin for a work meeting and could have left earlier to get back home. And the sessions that I made, it felt as if we were only going through the motions.

“After being relegated we said that we needed to get better. We needed to have higher standards for ourselves. And I promised myself I’d never have that feeling again. And since then I’ve just been obsessed with it. That day in 2017 leaving Tulla I said, ‘I’m going to turn this around and go after every little detail.’” He’d journal everything, setting lots of little goals. He works as a business development manager for ABC, a health and wellbeing nutrition company, and became his own best customer in that field. By nature he’d be the conscientious, quiet type but he realised that for Feakle to get back up to senior he’d have step up and speak up more as a leader. In Feakle onlookers have been struck for years by the intent and intensity of not just his own ballwork workouts but those he puts his backup Ronan O’Connor through.

In 2018 Feakle won promotion back up to senior. And then in November 2019 while he was in Boston he got that text from Lohan. He was stunned that he had even been on Lohan’s radar because Clare hadn’t really been on his.

“The way I had been looking at it was, ‘If I get my level of preparation and performance to a high standard, then it’ll benefit Feakle.’ It wasn’t about getting in with a Clare squad. I felt with the management that was there [Moloney and O’Connor] they just weren’t going to pick me. And I was okay with that; I’d have no bad feelings towards them. I’m sure there are goalies in Clare now that feel they’re not getting their chance and that they should; that’s just the nature of sport.” Lohan for him meant a clean slate. Once Quilligan was in he was away.

There’d be other setbacks. He was left off for the opening game of the 2023 championship, only for his replacement and friend Eamon Foudy to ship five goals at home to Tipperary.

“That was probably the hardest week or two. I had no issue with management; they just picked a guy who they felt was going to do the job.

“And then after losing that game we were on the backfoot right away, having to win in Limerick six days later, and you had people wanting to talk to you about it and the Tipp game. Will you be back in? Will ye win? Ye have to win! You learn to shut down conversations early. To become quite selfish, ignorant even.” This year losing a third straight Munster final was never in their plans. But always there was a bigger plan.

“The external narrative was that Clare were finished, or at least couldn’t win an All Ireland. And if I was on the outside I could see why. We were so poor and so flat on the day. And it was incredibly frustrating and disappointing for us at the time.

“But then we were given the week off. For the first couple of days you’d still have been feeling very sorry for yourself. By the Thursday then you were kind of thinking, ‘God, we need to be training. Why aren’t we training?’ But the time off, just chilling, taking our mind of hurling completely, really helped bring the energy, mentally as much as physically. When we went back that weekend you knew straightaway: We’re good here.” 

The one time he was genuinely worried was the Saturday week out from the final. “The Bs whipped us in training. It was the one time I struggled to sleep in the lead up to a big game. You were staring at the ceiling thinking, ‘My god, is this going to happen again that we’re going to lose?’ But we took it a signal of our strength in depth. We knew during the league from the way that lads stepped up that we were building a panel.” It showed in extra-time in the final as starters began to drop like flies. But in the end Clare prevailed, Quilligan the last man standing.

A couple of weeks later he was almost staggering. “I met John Conlon for a coffee and we both laughed at the fact that we were going to be out the following day playing a championship match for the club. Just mentally as well as physically to get back up after the celebrations and high of winning the All Ireland was a real challenge. Trying to come back in and give energy to the group.” But he found it. Now that group are in the county final, the first time the club have been in one since Uncle Val, Loughnane, Guilfoyle and Co. won it out in ’88.

“It’s a dream. In Feakle you’d hear all about the team of ’88 and the stories around them, but to be honest growing up the dream was to win an intermediate. That was seen as the limit for us. And I would have gone to games watching Feakle trying just to stay intermediate.

“Then within a few years it all changed and we won the intermediate and we pushed it on again. The dream changed. Every year I go in to see the county final and it would always hit me after the warmup and they’d be about to go into the parade: ‘Jesus, I’d love to be there. I’d love to have one crack at that.’ And now we get our crack on Sunday.” He has a habit of taking any he gets. He just has to tend to wait and have had to work for them.