DEFIANT DAVY FITZGERALD ISSUES WEXFORD WAR CRY
Davy Fitzgerald is looking forward to his second term at the helm in Wexford and relishes the new Championship format
IT IS used by those who seek to impersonate him for laughs, but Davy Fitzgerald’s capacity to milk offence for more than it is worth has served him well. It’s a good six months before Wexford get to dip their toes back into the Championship action and the only visible flame is the one burning in the photo-shoot prop for the launch of the Bord na Móna Leinster winter series at Tullamore’s O’Connor Park on a biting December morning, but Fitzgerald is already sparking.
‘I have it on my WhatsApp there,’ he protests.
‘We have gone out to fourth favourites in Leinster and we are nearly second last in the All-Ireland.
‘If I was going by Paddy Power we probably shouldn’t turn up at all next year,’ he rasps.
The reality is that far from finding offence at the lack of faith among bookmakers – they are 13/2 to win Leinster and the highest priced of the game’s heavy hitters to win the Liam MacCarthy at 25/1 – he has found comfort.
In taking his team so far, so fast in his first season, he is well aware that the law of gravity applies to more than physics.
The heights they scaled this year left them gasping for oxygen; promotion to Division 1, where they were distant third favourites behind Galway and Limerick for that prize, was capped by their first win over Kilkenny at Nowlan Park in 60 years.
And just to prove that was no freak, they laid Brian Cody’s team stone cold in Leinster on a never-to-be-forgotten June evening in Wexford Park on the way to a first Leinster final since 2008.
The sight of the Wexford hordes paying homage that night to Fitzgerald, who was serving a sideline suspension in a specially constructed viewing box with oneway glass, was surely the hurling summer’s iconic image.
So how do you follow that? With some difficulty, but there are targets that have to be met in 2018 and none bigger than securing a topthree finish in the round-robin Leinster Championship.
‘Naturally after the year ends you look at everything, you go over it and, all in all, probably if we had achieved that after two or three years I would have been happy enough. To achieve it in one was great but it puts a bit more pressure on you for next year.
‘When I met the county chairman he said if you can get us promoted and into a Leinster final in three years we will be more than grateful.
‘Where do you go now? In my head I would love to stay in Division 1 [A]; that would be massive. Number two, you would like to get one of the top-three spots in Leinster.
‘You f ***** g have to have that as a goal. If you get into one of the top-three spots you are there or thereabouts for All-Ireland quarter-final day.
‘Those are two things that I’ve said to myself I would love to do.
‘We will try everything to do that. As regards winning stuff, if you are managing to do that much then you are in with a chance of winning stuff.
‘Let’s do the simple things first and see after that what happens.
‘I’m not building castles in the sky because there is no point. I just don’t believe in saying we are going to win Leinster and win the All-Ireland.
‘I think that is a load of rubbish. I don’t think you can do that, we just take it game by game,’ he says.
It is not in his nature to reach for clichés in spelling out his world view, but in the game’s reshaped format next year there is simply no way to take it other than game by game. He will have four of them inside five weeks although he would have liked an extra week’s gap included just to draw breath, allow aching muscles to rest, but he is signed up as a supporter of the Championship’s new way. ‘We have a savage Leinster Championship this year; Dublin first, Offaly second, Galway then, and then the mother of all battles against Kilkenny. I know what is coming. That will be an intriguing battle to say the least. We have to go to Nowlan Park twice next year that is going to be absolutely incredible. ‘Big games... I like it, I really do.’ The same could be said for his players. The only way to get a read on the future is from the recent past and while it was the two wins over Kilkenny this year that had the Wexford supporters in raptures, victories over Limerick and Galway at the start of the year, revealed the true worth of his group.
Those successes not only set up Wexford’s successful promotion drive, but the manner in which they were achieved convinced him he had a team that would not back down from any challenge.
‘The game that sticks out in my head was the Galway game, we were the only team to beat Galway competitively.
‘We were seven points down in that, we were six points down against Limerick.
‘What I liked was the battling quality, we didn’t give in. Whether we were the better team or not made no difference, we were fighting until the end.’
But that spirit will only take them so far and if they want to climb higher, lessons have to be heeded.
They faltered in late summer, running out of steam in the second half of the Leinster final against Galway before failing to lay a glove on Waterford in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
Fitzgerald believes the price for a spring of sustained effort was to be found in heavy legs by the end of the summer.
‘Last year I took a gamble – I went earlier, I worked extremely hard.
‘I thought we got a small bit more tired as the year went on. That is why we were back to training later compared to other teams this time,’ he explains.
He will also return with some new faces in his group, including Colm Keogh, who has defected from the footballers, but that is as far as change will go.
There will be no break from his defensive, possession-based game-plan, insisting that structure remains key, identifying the price the Model County men played in the Leinster final fade-out as proof.
‘I thought we were competitive until four minutes coming into half-time. If you look at it we made a few mistakes; giving away a free, missing a penalty and then another chance to score.
‘I could count six or seven points in an eight-minute period which killed us.
‘Then we went back to playing direct ball, which if we do that with Wexford, we will not compete. We just won’t compete, I’m certain of that.’