Claret and gold everywhere.

"It's unbelievable, " acknowledges Jim McInerney, manager of the team that face Crusheen in this afternoon's Cusack Park showpiece in front of what is expected to be a bumper crowd of 15,000. "The place is awash with colour.

Some of us always felt hurling mattered to the people of Tulla, but it's turned out we didn't realise just how much.

It's amazing the way the whole parish has come alive since the semi-final."

That semi-final, a fortnight ago, pitted Tulla against Clarecastle. Now how long it was since Tulla beat the Magpies was an issue lost in the mists of time; certainly they hadn't got the better of them in McInerney's memory, which didn't begin yesterday. Sometimes, he reflects, Tulla put up a good show against Clarecastle. "And sometimes we got hammered." But not here, when six points from Andrew Quinn, their leading scorer, helped secure a 1-13 to 0-9 win.

To say the train had been coming down the tracks from east Clare for the past couple of years is not necessarily untrue; Tulla were county minor champions in 2000 and 12 of the team, as McInerney points out, range in age from 26 back to 20. Only three, among them Brian Quinn, corner-back when Clare captured their last Munster title in 1998, are the north side of 30.

But what mattered far more than their youth was their determination. "I think that's what's made the big difference. The lads have given a huge commitment, way more so than any other year. They were a bunch of young fellas up to now, but you can't stay that way forever. At some point you have to step up. And that's what they did."

Today's game, the first Clare decider since 1990 that doesn't feature any of Clarecastle, Sixmilebridge, Wolfe Tones na Sionna and St Joseph's Doora-Barefield, is a repeat of Tulla's first outing of the season. They drew with Crusheen that day and took heart from it, as it was Crusheen's second match. The encounter that really made Tulla's year, however, according to McInerney, was their meeting with Scarriff. "It's amazing how one good championship win can transform a team's season. Beating Scarriff gave us great confidence.

Things snowballed from there." They did indeed, as both Newmarket, Tulla's victims in the quarter-final, and Clarecastle will testify.

In his own playing days McInerney, who came on as a sub in the 1995 Munster final, never progressed beyond the county quarter-final stage.

Tulla's barren spell stretched much farther back than that, though. The last time they were champions was in 1933, when Paddy Quinn . . . grandfather of Brian Quinn and his three brothers . . . captained the side from full-back. The goalkeeper was, of course, the legendary Dr Tommy Daly.

No Clare club have been champions in three different centuries. Tulla won their first in 1888 and represented the county in the following year's All Ireland final, playing in their bare feet when defeated by Kickhams of Dublin. They also gave three players . . . captain Jack Coughlan and Paddy and John King . . . to the London side that won the 1901 All Ireland. Altogether they've been Clare champions seven times.

"We were always aware 1933 was the last time Tulla won the county, but that wasn't the kind of thing ever mentioned in dressing rooms. It's only in the past couple of weeks it's been highlighted.

"I suppose it's great we've made sure that it would be."

God rest you, Thomas Daly, on your windswept hill today.