Keelan Sexton unbowed as Clare face into 'Ulster championship'

Clare football may have endured a chastening afternoon in the Gaelic Grounds last Sunday but Keelan Sexton is eagerly looking forward to getting a crack at the "Ulster championship" in the coming month.

Having beaten Cork and Limerick en route to the provincial decider, seizing a spot in this year's Sam Maguire race in the process, Colm Collins' team were dismissed with brutal swagger and efficiency by a Kerry side clearly hungry for goals after failing to find the net against Tipperary.

While the outcome was taken as a sobering reminder of the gulf between the elite of the game and the over-performing middle, Sexton preferred to stress the unforced errors his team made, rather than accepting the result as simply the way of the world.

"If you looked at it from an emotional point of view, you're like 'Jaysus, what are we at, what are we doing?" Sexton told RTÉ Sport.

"But when you analytically go through the game, you see the mistakes which they punished us for.

"Any of the Division 1 teams, if you give them the ball 10 times in the first half with unforced turnovers, they're going to put you to the sword.

"But they played 11 of the 15 in the McGrath Cup below and they beat us by a point and we were dominant for aspects of it.

"I know you could say 'ah, pre-season this, pre-season that.' And that's a fair point.'

"I mean it's just an underperformance. If you look at the first 20 minutes, it was 0-04 to 0-01, how many wides had we? How many did we drop into the keeper? And they're clinical. You can see that they were slick up front.

"If you were to lay down and roll over every time you got a beating, you wouldn't be here."

Sexton was picking up the GAA/GPA Player of the Month award for April, having landed 0-04 and 1-04 respectively