"the 1990s seems such long ago" . . . not with a manifesto but with a simple intention.

"Arresting the slide, " says Mike McNamara. "That's what it's all about. The first target. The most difficult part of the job."

Building for the future?

Having a right tilt at the Munster title? The attempt to realise such ambitions will follow once the horse is put before the cart, not prior to it.

One day at a time.

The new Clare hurling manager is, he emphasises, under no illusions as to the extent of the task ahead of him. Munster remains the barometer; McNamara is starting from zero. "We've fallen behind all the teams in the province, we've slid down the pecking order at an alarming rate and we'll only be in a position to rebuild once we arrest the slide. That might sound easy, but it's very difficult to do. Look at Offaly and Wexford, no disrespect to either of them. They're making ferocious efforts to get back to where they used to be.

It's always hard to regain lost ground, though.

"The whole county is looking forward to brighter days, to a stage where we can reinvent or re-enact the years when we went out every day with the realistic possibility of beating the top teams. Those days appear to have drifted into the sunset. Every Clare man and woman wants them back. I'm not alone there. And I'm proud not only to be managing the county but to be managing it because the clubs wanted me to."

Ideally, McNamara admits, he would have liked to have returned two or three years earlier, before the last of the old guard he'd worked with a decade ago drifted off into the Dalcassian twilight. To pine for the loss of Brian Lohan and Seanie McMahon is idle, however. "The team I was involved with are gone.

I'm taking over a new team and you have to make the best of what you have. That means going out and digging up some players for key positions. Guys who will come in and command their places."

Whether such players exist is a different matter. The days of wine and roses . . . the county won two All Irelands and three Munster titles under the triumvirate of McNamara, Loughnane and Considine . . . gave way to an age of dry bread and water more abruptly and more dramatically than most people could have dreamed of. Clare haven't won a Munster final since 1998. Far more significantly and disturbingly, they haven't reached a Munster final since 1999. Of the nine matches they've played in the provincial championship in the meantime, they've won only one, the 2003 quarterfinal against Tipperary. Nor has there been any light at the end of the underage tunnel.

McNamara's response to the consequent charge that the talent simply isn't there?

"If there's not 20 good hurlers in the county, then we can throw our hat at it."

He won't be relying on his old drill-sergeant approach, he asserts. (McNamara's autobiography was entitled The Road to Hell. ) "Everybody moves on. You must move on, you must change. You must be able to adapt to new ways, new approaches, a new world, maybe." His conversion to different methods will, he promises, be evident in the identity and attitude of the members of his management team. "I don't want a backroom team, I want a frontroom team." Men who'll stand beside him rather than behind him and act on their own initiative.

At the moment Fergie Tuohy and Ollie Baker are the leading candidates to join McNamara and Alan Cunningham, the coach, on the management side. Six or seven training sessions and nothing more, meanwhile, have been scheduled for before Christmas.

Old face. New approach.