Griffin was there too, helping out as a water-carrier, Ballyea's answer to Didier Deschamps for one night only.

Immersed, like Stef was, in Cusack Park's little cauldron on the evening that was in it.

At one stage he even found himself perilously close to invading the pitch, after a ball went over Declan O'Rourke's head towards the corner and O'Rourke chased it, with Griffin haring along the sideline beside him. Somehow he resisted the urge to run in and make a complete eejit of himself.

Last Sunday morning he had another, rather less public chance to make an eejit of himself in Cusack Park: his first practice match since his return from cycling across Canada. As it happened, the first ball he got he pointed before missing the next two from easier positions. But it wasn't the wides that worried him. Nor was it his first touch, which proved to be crisper than he'd feared it might be.

Griffin's one real qualm afterwards concerned his decisionmaking.

"Beforehand, I'd get the ball and I'd know almost instinctively what to do. A shot or a pass or a run. On Sunday I didn't. I needed to take an extra second to see."

A similar reality will obtain should Tony Considine choose . . . or be forced . . . to hand Griffin a taste of the action today.

He's nowhere near match-fit, having played his last competitive match on 18 February.

He's less than physically fit, having received cryotherapy treatment last weekend on the shoulder he dislocated in Canada. Then there's the psychological end of it; how well he's tuned in mentally is anybody's guess. But facing Richie Bennis's Limerick in an All Ireland quarter-final, Clare can't be relying on guesswork.

Neither can they be remotely sure of compiling a likely matchwinning score. A year or two ago there existed a school of thought within the county that the Clare forwards were, in an inversion of the verities of the past 10 years, better than the Clare backs. The school has since been demolished. Putting a sufficient number of points on the board in any given championship match remains a more laborious task for Clare than it does for any of the other leading counties.

One or two statistics will serve to illuminate the extent of the challenge ahead of them here. Ignoring their openingday hammering of Down, the average number of points they scored per National League outing this season was just over 13. Excluding the 3-21 they rattled off in Casement Park, they've been hitting less than 1-14 per game in the championship, even if the Laois match did take place amid an O'Moore Park monsoon. Their attack leader is Niall Gilligan, a shrewd operator a level below the very top class. One of his chief lieutenants is Diarmuid McMahon, by vocation a centre-back. But in the absence of Griffin and Tony Carmody, who between them hit 2-34 from play in Clare's six championships outings last summer, little of this should be cause for wonder.

Ask Anthony Daly whether the Banner's shortcomings in attack will, like the poor, always be with us and he points out that life in this regard is "the same for most counties at the moment, save for Kilkenny, maybe, and Waterford". Where Clare at least had room for manoeuvre during his term as manager, he adds, was in the weight of numbers at their disposal, with eight or nine players going for the six positions.

How talented the eight or nine were was another matter; none would ever have been taken for Eoin Kelly or Henry Shefflin. The shame for Daly was that none would ever have been taken for Jamesie O'Connor either.

"Had we Jamesie in his heyday, a flying Jamesie, we'd have won that middle All Ireland. He'd have given us four points a match from play and put over the frees, which were a problem against Galway a few weeks ago. And then we'd been able to have the Niall Gilligans and Alan Markhams chipping in around him."

Though Daly doesn't say so explicitly, it's an indictment of the standard within the county that Gilligan, who scored three points in the 1997 All Ireland final, is still the best forward on the club scene locally. "And with the county, Gilly would be an awful lot better if he had some class yoke at full-forward to play off."

Talking of Gilligan, Daly makes mention of his decisive goal against Galway at Cusack Park. A hopeful ball in from out the field, the sliotar breaking on the edge of the square, Gilligan pouncing. "That's the kind of goal Clare haven't been getting in recent years. Okay, people say that you make your own breaks, but sometimes the breaks just happen.

Eamon Taffe in the 1995 All Ireland final, like. I wasn't trying to make the ball come back off the crossbar, I assure you. Clare haven't been getting those breaks."

What they've also lacked, Daly continues, is one or two forwards capable of making the sliotar stick when it was cleared out of defence, "lads who'll fight for it and hold it as long as they can." In retrospect he's sorry he didn't persist with Frank Lohan, who he reckons had the potential to develop into "a serious forward" had Clare tried reinventing him there in the late 1990s. In the fuss over Dan Shanahan's hat-trick and Clare's collapse in the 2004 Munster quarter-final, Lohan's 0-3 from full-forward was overlooked by almost everyone . . . and underappreciated by the management, who whisked him back up the field at the earliest opportunity.

"We buckled under the pressure to make repairs in the full-back line and we shouldn't have. We should have left Frank up front. We could always have found another corner-back." The lack of leadership up front reached a costly nadir in the closing quarter of the 2005 All Ireland semi-final, a match whose scoreline will probably be found tattooed on Daly's heart when he shuffles off this mortal coil. "My only criticism of the lads that day was that there was nobody to take things by the scruff of the neck when we were four points up. To do a Conor Clancy on it. To catch a ball, or else to make damn sure that the guy they were marking didn't catch it."

Known knowns or unknown unknowns, Clare will require goals for a winning total this afternoon, in which case the good news is that they'll be in with a shout. Of the 10 leading championship goalscorers still playing, Niall Gilligan is joint-second on the list alongside Henry Shefflin on 18 goals and Alan Markham joint-ninth on 10.

Sharing the slot with Markham? Tony Griffin.

If Stef from Cologne is reading, that guy in the black and amber helmet today is your pal Tony from the other night.

Should he come on early, take it that Clare are in trouble.

2007 CHAMPIONSHIP SCORING RECORDS OF TODAY'S TEAMS CLARE Clare 1-11 Cork 1-18 Clare 3-21 Antrim 2-15 Clare 2-10 Galway 0-14 Clare 2-14 Laois 1-11 Average score 2-14 CORK Cork 1-18 Clare 1-11 Cork 3-18 Waterford 5-15 Cork 3-20 Dublin 0-15 Cork 1-27 Offaly 0-11 Cork 1-18 Tipperary 2-16 Average score 1-22.6 LIMERICK Limerick 1-19 Tipperary 1-19 Limerick 1-19 Tipperary 1-19 (normal time) Limerick 0-15 Tipperary 1-12 (nt) Limerick 1-14 Waterford 3-17 Average score 1-16 WATERFORD Waterford 5-15 Cork 3-18 Waterford 3-17 Limerick 1-14 Average score 4-16