BRENDAN CLARKE: 'My own young lad is beginning his career in the league... ' | The League of Ireland's old dog for the long road
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How has Brendan Clarke's career evolved since 2003?
Off the Ball Rugby.
Then all we'll never know until we play. We know on the evidence of play well for your province, play well in Europe, play well in the URC, consistently back it up for a couple, four, five, six matches and then people go, give it a go.
Join in the obsession.
Subscribe now at offtheball.com forward slash join. Brendan Clarke, we're here for another year.
Since 2003, so 24, 25 seasons I think. 25, unbelievable. And another club ticked off as well, not long. I'm not trying to tick them all off. But yeah, no, look, it's an exciting prospect, the club. It's under new ownership. They're looking to put plans in place for the next few years and do things right. It was something once the manager and the chief executive got in touch and I met with them. I like what they had to say and my role in it. Delighted to be here. They must have been fairly impressive to lure you on for another season. I was going to play anyway. It wasn't like they were talking me out of retirement. It's another year.
What factors influenced Brendan's decision to join Athlone Town?
I'm really looking forward to it. The body's feeling good. I'm not feeling my age, which everyone keeps asking me about. I'm just looking forward to getting the season up and running now at this stage.
Your 20 appearances for Galway last season in the Premier Division, was it ever a chance you were going to stay on there once Athlone came to you? Was that it, the mind was made up?
No, I think I'd done three years in Galway. My own young lad, he'll be 14 now in April, he's starting his own career in the League of Ireland, in the academy. Is he a keeper? He's not, I was very firm on that. But no, look, I think it comes to a stage where you have to start looking at what he's doing in life and needing me around, kind of stuff like that. He's at that funny age that teenagers get to, you know. So I think three years in Galway was long enough. Delighted. I loved my time there. And to be honest, I've never felt relief like I did at the final whistle down in Waterford. No, we hadn't kind of slipped into the playoff place and we'd stayed in the division. Really successful time there, promotion, cup semi-final and then staying in the division twice was fantastic.
How tough was that last season? Obviously you've been around as a player for so long, you've been involved in relegation battles, but to have the loss of Olly Horgan thrown into the mix as well, it must have been so tough for everyone involved.
Yeah, to be honest, I'm still shook by it, to be honest, still rattled. I've had to go and speak to professionals about it. We have all these... all these facilities available to us and I'm obviously happy to avail them but in terms of the group it was a very strange feeling around the place Yeah, I don't know. I think in the end, towards the back end of the season, we kind of got back to what Ollie would have instilled in us, Ollie and John would have instilled in us, and kind of being horrible, being hard to beat, and then playing football when we could, but just being really dogged. I like to think we did him proud in the last few weeks that we managed to stay up.
We've heard so many stories throughout the year from all of you when you used to go up to Finn Harps and maybe the water might be cold in the dressing room or the pitch would be let go a bit waterlogged. Was that dark art something that maybe helped you spray on over the line towards the end?
Yeah, listen, he was obviously a very, very clever manager in terms of using any I suppose using any of the little one percenters that might give you an advantage over the opposition. I'm not sure he was a qualified plumber to be leaving the cold showers on, but no, he was a fantastic, not even football related, just a fantastic human being. He broke my heart, he broke everyone's hearts when he sadly passed. But like I said, just as a group, we were just delighted to be able to kind of get the job done and stay up because I know that would have been he would have hated that you know us being relegated and stuff so just to get that done as a group and obviously people go it's football people go different ways different directions but we were there for a short time and yeah look he obviously he definitely left a mark on many of us you're pushing into 40 now I'm past 40 past 40 nearly 600 games
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