*Wayne Freeman. Photograph: Ben McShane/Sportsfile
WAYNE Freeman has stepped down as manager of the Clare intermediate ladies football team.
Freeman called time on his two year tenure after Clare’s surprising All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Tyrone in Cusack Park on Sunday. For the second year in a row, their last championship game was a one point defeat.
Monasterevin native Wayne was appointed as Clare boss in October 2022 on a two year term with the option of a third. While it is expected he would have received the backing of Clare LGFA, he along with Lee Hunt, Brian Willis, Graham Shine and Jack MacNamee will not be involved next year.
Under the Kildare man’s watch, Clare reached the All-Ireland intermediate final for the first time since 2016 last year and lost out by a single point to Kildare in the decider when it finished 2-11 2-10. This year, they were crowned Division 3 League Champions and secured their place in the second tier for 2025.
Following Sunday’s quarter-final loss, Wayne confirmed to The Clare Echo that he had stepped down as manager, a decision he and his management had reached at the beginning of the year. “If Clare was closer to Kildare I’d love to stay on because I do enjoy working with them but it is too far and it is too much travel on us, we’ve small families and they know we have stepped away, it is a bit emotional for us because we think very fondly of them, we enjoy working with them, we enjoy each other’s company. It is not a good day in general but I wish the successor all the best and I think he is going to inherit a really good group of footballers”.
Reflecting on his term, he described it as “phenomenal. Caoimhe Harvey was only back at the time after having a baby, what a two years she has had, she is an absolutely phenomenal captain, I’ve so much time for her and she is just one, look at what Chloe and Laurie have done in soccer, there’s loads more, Roisin is travelling from England, we are based in Ennis but most of our players are in West Clare and the travel that they have to do, I can’t tell you how fondly I think of them because they are brilliant, I have thoroughly enjoyed it”.
Announcing the news to the panel in the dressing room in Cusack Park was difficult, the Iarnród Éireann HR official admitted. “I thanked them for their work, I told them how proud I was of them, it was an emotional few minutes in the dressing room, we didn’t see this coming and there is no point lying, that is because of our form this year in general, I thanked them for everything they have done, they have worn the jersey with brilliant pride, the support they had today was super, I go back two years ago when nobody gave us a hope, even within our county people were looking at the team and saying ‘they are going nowhere’, now they are back up in Division 2, they have competed in Croke Park and they are back up at the top end, they will be favourites again next year, they have to be rebound, look at Dublin these things happen, this is football, big teams have gone out of the men’s game and now the women’s game, these things happen in sport and not everything will be plain sailing, you just hope on days like today when you are not fully at it that you might just get over the line because the next day will be a better day but that wasn’t for us today which is unfortunate”.
Having been the first ‘outsider’ to manage Clare since Neil Moynihan in 2016, Wayne stressed the importance of the panel sticking together to aid whoever succeeds him in the role. “It would be devastating for the county really (if players left) because I think and she will kill me for saying this but I think Laurie Ryan is the eldest in there, Laurie is still flying around the place so it would be devastating for the county. The biggest problem with ladies football is the turnover of players is too big and that is everywhere, that is not just Clare, we’ve had a massive turnover of players since Evan’s (Talty) time, it has been phenomenal and you wouldn’t believe it so I hope they stay together because they have a massive core of potential still to go, I’m sure there’s one or two more to come back next year from their travels, big players, I think they will be favourites next year and I’d love to see them go on and win it”.
Clare’s performance against Tyrone was littered with mistakes, he acknowledged. “We didn’t play well enough today and that is a fact, we didn’t have the control we wanted to have in the game, we were a little bit erratic and making decisions off the cuff rather than sticking to the plan. They were good and that wasn’t surprising, we were expecting that, Chloe McCaffrey was back for them today and that was a huge boost but we let too much slip throughout the game, even at six points up we still felt we were chasing a bit, it was never comfortable and that played through in the end. I don’t know what it is but we were a little bit off, some of our kick passing went straight out over the sideline which is not like us at all, we would normally have way more control than that”.
Even though Clare kicked two goals in the space of a minute in the first half via Laurie Ryan and Ailish Considine to carve out a six point half time lead, they still let Tyrone back into the game which was a source of frustration. “They overloaded the front on the kickouts which made a plus two in there and we couldn’t really deal with that, we made the decision to drop to the 45 and that worked a little bit, we made a couple of individual changes which worked, we started to wrestle them back and then the goals came when we made those changes, realistically we should have been pushing on but still they were finding holes down the middle and at half time we thought we solved it but the goal in the second half was a killer for us. When you are making unusual errors it feeds back into the rest of the team, it wasn’t just the goal, it was kicks over the line and our handpasses hitting the floor, it creates more nervousness and that seems to seep through to the team and I think that is more what happened more than anything else, we just got nervous and we got afraid, we started to get jittery and as soon as we started to make mistakes they punished us in the second half, that is why they went on to win it”.
Sharpness was clear to see in Clare training, he insisted. “We’ve trained the house down, we have trained the absolute house down and we have never let up in terms of working hard, we were never going through the motions, there was no example of it happening in training that we weren’t really at the races or we weren’t sharp or looking fit, you could see towards the end we were chasing all over the place so fitness was there and the legs were there, I think it was just sharpness of the mind, we were switching off and runners were coming from behind us and we weren’t aware of them and our communication wasn’t great, some of it is hard to figure out right now until you review it and some of it is obvious, I thought we got to grips with the obvious stuff and made changes but over the course of sixty minutes when you do make individual errors and from big players because they are the ones you look to lead but when they make little errors then everyone else gets nervous so it was an accumulation of both”.
“Even in the last sixty seconds we had a couple of shots we didn’t take and it would be unusual for them, that is the main part of the game that we have worked on, with a minute to go what are we doing, we didn’t execute it, there was some frees in the second half which he didn’t give considering he was so finnicky with how he refereed it which made it very hard for us to get a foothold in the game, we weren’t really fouling but he was blowing for fouls, we had players on ticks early on in the game so they couldn’t tackle, Caoimhe was on two ticks after fifteen minutes and we didn’t know what they were for, little things like that. They had him against Leitrim so they knew what he was looking for, maybe we didn’t manage him well but it is probably an accumulation of all small things rather than one big thing,” he added.
