ROLE MODEL
Conor McDonald was an 18-year-old sen sation the last time Wexford electrified a hurlin g summer. Now he’s a team leader as they seek to make up for lost time
TO PORTLAOISE then, Wexford hurlers following a new faith and, now, desperate to express themselves in the grammar of summer.
Conor McDonald doesn’t sugarcoat their circumstance. “We have to win this,” he says of tomorrow’s Leinster Championship tilt with Laois. “Because if we lose this, all our momentum stops and everyone starts questioning us again. Lose and we’re a shambles!”
Davy Fitz will be in the O’Moore Park stand of course, still exiled for that indiscretion of April 16. Yet it will be his energy that sends this team to battle and, if Wexford have big hopes and plans for the months ahead, they recognise the immediate threat here too.
“We know how Laois feel,” stresses McDonald. “A lot of people have been talking about us playing Kilkenny and, for Laois, that’s probably a big motivation. It’ll give them an extra few per cent going into this game. And we’re going to have to meet that head on!”
He was working with an uncle in Nottingham when the ‘Davy for Wexford’ story first grew legs last autumn. With only sporadic access to wifi, McDonald wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it until, one evening, taking a call from the man himself. He’d gone to England with an open mind about his future yet now, suddenly, the tug of home was strong.
Because something told him an electric storm was now blowing Wexford’s way. Even his own, first instinct maybe captured the changing zeitgeist. Putting down the phone to Davy that evening, McDonald remembers thinking ‘I need to get myself into shape!’
CATAPULTED
This is, essentially, the Gorey man’s fourth season as a senior county man, but the first taught him the folly of presuming. He was just 18 in the summer of 2014 when catapulted forward as a marquee presence in the Liam Dunne team that ended the AllIreland title defence of Davy Fitz’s Clare.
Wexford looked close to the top table again only to, somehow, lose their footing. What happened? “To be fair, we were kind of riddled with injuries,” explains McDonald. “But as a group, I don’t know, maybe we thought it was going to happen every year. That’s probably what’s frustrated us more than anything since 2014. We knew the players were there, yet we weren’t going that extra mile. We reckoned we were doing enough but, in hindsight, we weren’t.
“Like, just in terms of working hard during a game when you don’t have the ball, we were probably at around two out of ten. Now the minimum is six or seven. Anything under that and we’d be disgusted with ourselves.”
He was an infant in ’96, famously pictured in a buggy at the top of Gorey town the night Liam MacCarthy came through to a cacophony of beeping, jubilant car horns. Eight years later, he was with maybe 50 other Naomh Éanna kids in the Davin Stand when Mick Jacob snared a last-minute goal to beat Kilkenny in the Leinster semi-final.
The scenes that day gave him a sharp sense of what hurling means in Wexford.
“We were maybe ten rows up in the stand, nobody sitting below us,” he remembers. “Like we didn’t see the goal coming ... just another high ball going in and Kilkenny so strong in the air. But the moment Jacob made the block down on Peter Barry, we all jumped out of our seats. And when the ball hit the net, I think I ended up two or three rows down from where I’d been sitting. I’ll never forget it.”
Wexford beat Offaly in the subsequent Leinster final, yet would bank little of long-term value from that summer.
And, for a child of the empty years that followed, local heroes became thin on the ground. McDonald was too young to have seen club legends like Billy Byrne and Ger Cushe in their prime and, so, it was a February day in ’07 that he came upon the man who’d become his role model.
After Ballyhale Shamrocks overcame a dozen-point deficit to beat Toomevara in the All-Ireland Club semi-final, an 11-year-old McDonald stayed behind, watching Henry Shefflin ease through the informal courtesies with a statesman’s poise. He felt utterly star-struck, so much so the green helmet he favours today is in honour of Shefflin, a man – of course – who torpedoed many a Wexford dream.
Yet, McDonald hopes that this team can go to different places now, given they have already done so in preparation.
He recalls “rotten” December nights in Ferns, when “in the muck and the slop and the lashing rain, we were being killed”. The Fitzgerald revolution set a brandnew Constitution. “He pushed us to places in pre-season that probably no-one ever thought we’d go,” suggests McDonald. “We seemed to be coming in after every single session, saying ‘That’s the hardest thing that I’ve ever done!’
“Then you’d come in the next night and say exactly the same. There was nearly this euphoria when you’d got through it. You see, we really dreaded some of those sessions, knowing what was coming.
“Previously, certain guys would have just declared themselves injured. And one thing I’ve discovered is that the harder you train, the more you think about the extra stuff you have to do. Now when we have a really tough session, I know I have to go to the pool the next day. I have to get my recovery right, my food right.
“Because, if I don’t, I won’t be able to do the next session properly.”
Even now, he says Fitzgerald surprises them. He remember the first night they trained under his baton, thinking that if the energy of that session was a reliable base setting, the journey ahead would be “unbelievable!”
And he hasn’t been disappointed.
SHATTERED
“Every night he kind of shocks me in the sense that he is able to do that,” he says of the Sixmilebridge man. “I mean you’d often see him getting out of the car and he looks shattered to be honest with you. But the minute he crosses that line or goes into the dressing-room, it’s BANG. He just comes alive.
“It’s unreal he notices so much in training that you don’t expect him to notice. JJ (Doyle) or Paraic (Fanning) or Seoirse (Bulfin) might be doing a drill and he’ll just quietly pull you aside. You just get the sense that he sees everything and that’s a huge thing, say, for players who aren’t on the team. They know he’s watching and, because of that, they’ll keep bursting themselves in training.”
The Tipp incident is history now, with little enough left to process or analyse. But McDonald says simply that, to the team, it articulated their manager’s commitment. “He’s huge into loyalty,” he says. “And once you show him that loyalty, he’ll do anything for you. There’s a lot more layers to him than what people outside the bubble see. They think ‘Oh Davy, psycho on the line!’ They don’t really get him. Trust me, on that. If stuff goes wrong, he’s the first to say it was his fault.”
Laois and Wexford haven’t met in Leinster Championship combat since ’05, yet League collisions seldom yield a comprehensive scoreline.
As McDonald reads it: “I’ve been in college with a couple of their players, Paddy Purcell and Ross King, and I’d seriously rate them. They’ve been ripping it up in the round robin. A lot of people are still talking about our League run but, in a couple of years’ time, nobody’s going to remember that. It’s all about what you do in Championship.
“And we can’t even think about beating the Kilkennys and Tipps unless we beat Laois first!”