Clare golden crop seek to make good on early promise

It's rare that the hype and yearning is more focused on the county with 30 All-Irelands than the county with four.

This week, most of the pre-game romance has attached itself to Cork, with Pat Horgan seeking to pull off the Dinny Allen move of finally winning an All-Ireland very late in the day after an extremely long inter-county career.

Clare, traditional underdogs, smaller fish according to a former manager and one-time whipping boys according to a former captain, are in the unusual position of being the slightly less heart-warming choice from most neutrals' perspective.

The stat has been well circulated that all four teams in the All-Ireland final across both codes are seeking to bridge a gap of over a decade - an exceptionally unusual event and certainly the first time it's happened since 1989.

Clare have the shortest gap of any of the four and are the only team in action over the next eight days with current All-Ireland senior medallists in the squad.

From the starting team named by Brian Lohan on Friday, just four are veterans of the 2013 All-Ireland saga - David McInerney, Tony Kelly, John Conlon and Shane O'Donnell.

Seadna Morey, who came off the bench in the replay and embarked on that injury-time solo run up the left wing to set up the insurance goal for Darach Honan, is likewise named among the substitutes this Sunday.

As the only previous All-Ireland final between Clare and Cork, the 2013 decider - aka, the 'Holy Moses' final - has naturally been the subject of plenty of retrospectives this week.

There's also been a degree of mystification as to how all the promise of the revolutionary summer evaporated over the subsequent years.

The 2013 campaign was such a wild outlier in the context of the era generally, the