Old friends reunited as Corofin’s Fitzgerald eyes glory
Ex-Galway star hits out at Sigerson fixture ‘farce’ ahead of club semi-final showdown
ON SATURDAY in Carrick-on-Shannon, Kieran Fitzgerald will do as he has done for more than two decades now and stand sentry in front of the Corofin goal.
And as he looks up the field, he’ll be expecting to see Gaoth Dobhair’s Kevin Cassidy come in and join him. It will be an unlikely reunion for two members of the All-Star touring party that visited California in 2003.
The pair were in the infancy of their careers back then but this weekend, and with Cassidy revisited as a full-forward, they’ll rage against each other and the dying of the light.
“It’s a long time ago, nearly 20 years,” Fitzgerald, who turned 38 last month, said of the trip he and Cassidy shared Stateside. “And I’m sharing a dressing-room now with guys who are just out of minor. It’s hard at times to relate to them but I enjoy it. It’s good craic but we’re at entirely different stages in life.
“You’re talking about mortgages and they’re talking about going out on the town on a Thursday night in Galway so it is completely different. They think I’m nearly part of the management team!”
Fitzgerald has kept ticking over. Ever since winning an All-Ireland and an All-Star in 2001 he has gathered an impressive array of honours. Thirteen times he’s been part of a Galway-winning team – a record – while he has also picked up five Connacht club SFC titles as well as two All-Irelands.
“We don’t take it for granted ... we’ve been fortunate enough to be at this stage a number of times. There is a bit of a routine.
Structure
“I don’t know how many semi-finals we’ve been involved in over the last few years but the break between Christmas and that – you kind of have a structure to it from this year and the previous year and the year before that and you learn from it.”
The schedule grates on him. From the Connacht final to the All-Ireland semi-final there is, as he puts it, “60 days to go for 60 minutes of football.” It’s too long to wait for too little football.
“It is crazy and I think it has to change. St Patrick’s Day, while it’s well known for club finals, has to change.
“If you had someone from another sporting body and you explained to them that these guys are training for 60, 70 days for one game they’d think it was mad.
“From a GAA point of view, before Christmas it is all club: county finals and provincial finals dominate what’s happening at the time. Then all of a sudden it just stops and then when it comes back it gets lost.”
“We play Gaoth Dobhair on Saturday and by then I feel the GAA community has lost interest in the club game and the inter-county season has started and there’s huge enthusiasm with new managers and all that and between that and the Sigerson it gets lost.
“If it was structured a bit better you could have a club final two weeks before Christmas and I don’t think any club player would have a problem with that – playing under lights in Croke Park. Then the club season is finished and the inter-county season can move on.
“You ask any county manager and club fixtures after Christmas are a pure inconvenience. Mullinalaghta, Crokes and Gaoth Dobhair all have players with their counties – players the county manager would love to have.”
It is a particularly galling scenario as two of his team-mates are hit with
a scheduling conflict for the second season in a row.
UCD’s Sigerson Cup semi-final clash is fixed for Saturday meaning Liam Silke will miss out on the college game completely. Kieran Molloy is slightly luckier but faces the prospect of two high-tempo matches inside 24 hours when NUI Galway face UCC in the other last-four clash on Sunday.
It mirrors the situation of 12 months ago when Molloy was transported the 100km from Tullamore to Dublin in a Garda car, joining his team-mates in the second half of their Sigerson final defeat to UCD.
Silke didn’t travel to join up with the south Dublin outfit because of an injury he picked up that day. And Fitzgerald reckons it’s ridiculous situation to put players in.
“It is farcical,” he said.
“For two years in a row the Sigerson, which is a very prestigious competition, has been denied the two of them. I know Kieran got on for 20 minutes last year but they were due to miss out completely this year.
“One game has been moved but it means playing twice in two days and you’re talking player welfare?
“Our game against Gaoth Dobhair will be hell for leather, no holding back and asking someone to do it again the next day is not good enough.”