It was a bad day at the office for Brian Lohan and Clare. They failed to back up their league win against Limerick losing 6-20 to 0-23 to Cork in Cusack Park Ennis.
The results effectively mean the Banner men will play Division 1B Hurling in 2026.
On a weekend that saw seven red cards dished out in the top flight of hurling, including two for Lohan's Clare and one for Cork, the Banner boss was unsurprisingly less than pleased.
Speaking to Maurice Brosnan of the Irish Examiner after the game, Lohan bemoaned the lack of notice he, his players and inter-county managers received about a crackdown in refereeing ahead of the weekend's fixtures.
"I think that game was refereed differently to anything we've seen so far,” Lohan.
The word I'm getting is that there was a big meeting with the referees during the week, and they laid down the law, but nobody told us, and nobody told the players. It is not good enough to get all this information second-hand or third-hand and have two players sent off as a result of it.
Of course, but if they're going to change the way the game is refereed, the least you could do is tell us. So, four red cards in Kilkenny, three here and one last night (Conor Cooney). OK, there was no debate last night; it should have been a red. But I don't know. I thought Peter's was a harmless tackle. I thought the goalkeeper ducked his head to get around the tackle, which was harmless.
It looks like the game was refereed completely differently to how the games have been refereed so far this year. A little bit of notice is, I think, what we deserve.
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9 March 2025; Referee Liam Gordon shows a red card to David Fitzgerald of Clare during the Allianz Hurling League Division 1A match between Clare and Cork at Zimmer Biomet Páirc Chíosóg in Ennis, Clare. Photo by John Sheridan/Sportsfile
Pat Ryan echoes Lohan's refereeing complaints
Cork boss Pat Ryan also spoke to the press after the game, saying that he spoke to Liam Gordan ahead of the throw-in after hearing about the red cards in the earlier game.
“We heard about it [the red cards in Kilkenny-Tipperary] an hour before the game, and I asked Liam about it,” Ryan said.
He said it would just be as normal. There’s a duty of care, and I think that’s how we should be going – there’s a duty of care on each player to look after it.
But, look, it is a really fast game we’re playing, and we don’t want to take the physicality out of it, but we don’t want anything malicious.
There are incidents that happen that are malicious, but there are also incidents that are just about players getting carried away with the passion that is in the game.
Whether this weekend's crackdown was a once off, or a trend that we'll see run all the way through to Championship only time will tell.
