MORAN: DÉISE DON’T MIND THE FLAK
Moran says jibes about Waterford’s negative tactics are a sign other counties are worried again
KEVIN MORAN has become a happy subscriber to that Oscar Wilde witticism which declares that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. He has heard the jibe about Waterford’s game-plan, the one that claims they are Donegal with sticks, importers of football’s dreaded blanket to the ancient game where they will seek to suffocate anything that moves.
He could get irate over it but the truth is, after dropping off the cliff for a few seasons, he is glad Waterford hurling is relevant again.
Today they play in their first national semi-final in four years – the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final loss to Kilkenny the last time they went this far in a national competition – as they eyeball Tipperary in Nowlan Park for a place in the Allianz League final. It is the kind of game that once came packaged as routine.
In his first six years after breaking into the Waterford panel in 2006, they made it to the penultimate stage of the Championship every time – and beyond in 2008 – in the process becoming the housewives’ favourites, everyone’s second team.
The perception of Waterford was of a pure force, off-the-cuff hurlers who lived off their touch and their wit, going bald-headed for it at every opportunity before eventually getting torched for their noble intent.
‘Waterford have not won an All-Ireland since 1959. It is nothing short of pure madness if you keep doing the same thing and expect to get a different result,’ says Moran who, at 28, is in his second stint as captain.
‘You have to keep changing things and see what works to maximise your chance of winning matches.’
The reality is that the perception of being trigger-happy hurlers happy to fly by the seat of their talented pants was not strictly true.
It might have been when the evangelical influence of Justin McCarthy held sway in their dressing room but, when Davy Fitzgerald arrived in 2008, he brought a blackboard and defensive order.
Maybe not to the degree that Derek McGrath has mastered this spring, which has seen Waterford shut out four of their six opponents thus far, boasting the best defensive record in the League’s top two tiers, although it appears to have also been lost on some of their critics that they have also scored more than anyone else
But then people see what they want to see and Moran argues there is not a serious hurling team out there who still believes matches can be won with the wrist rather than the head.
‘Every serious team is doing huge amounts of training and they are not just going to go out and just see what happens on the day.
‘They are going to have some kind of plan, whether that is working in numbers, getting back, isolating fullforwards; there are any number of game-plans and each team its own.
ICERTAINLY wouldn’t agree with this notion we have become the Donegal of hurling. We are a very attack-minded team but we do get back in numbers. ‘I don’t let all this talk bother me, because it was worse when they had no reason to be talking about us for a few years there.
‘I don’t think there is a huge amount of science to it, there is just a huge hunger there and it’s all about numbers really, getting back in numbers and going forward in numbers.
‘Yes, we have worked hard on it and we are all singing off the same hymn sheet in that there are roles which we have to fulfil but we are still hurling off-the-cuff as well and there is great freedom enjoyed by each player, it is just that you don’t forget your other responsibilities.’
And their biggest responsibility is to each other. Waterford are a unified group, despite the fact they are also a relatively new one.
Between the retirements which claimed Séamus Prendergast, Shane Walsh, Stephen Molumphy and a bold pre-season cull that saw Liam Lawlor, Richie Foley and Jamie Nagle cut, Moran is looking at a very different dressing room these days.
The youngsters from that 2013 All-Ireland winning team have started to come through – Brian O’Halloran, Tom Devine and Michael Kearney have impressed this spring – and, while absent friends are missed, change has suited them.
‘There is a lot of great servants to Waterford hurling who are not involved this year but you just get on with it. And we still have a lot of experience in the panel, with the likes of Michael ‘Brick’ Walsh and Shane O’Sullivan,
‘It is a nice atmosphere at the moment and I do think that the younger boys have raised the bar a bit higher for the rest of us.
WE ARE happy with what we have; we don’t have three or four household names or anything like that. We are just working as a team and there is a real sense of unity there in terms of working for each other more than any team that I have ever been involved with.’
It was a difficult season last year for both the team and McGrath, relegation from Division 1A and a Championship exit to Wexford meant that the criticism was raw.
The reasons for that may have been two-fold – partly rooted in the move by the players to oust Michael Ryan at the end of 2013 which did not sit well with some but mainly because they were losing big and ugly.
Two trimmings from Clare and Kilkenny in the League did not help but what made the game-plan grate with their own was not so much how it looked, but how it failed.
‘There was a lot of over-the-top and unfair criticism coming from people within your own county,’ he admits.
‘There is huge pressure but you want to be in these situations, bang in the middle. You’re in the spotlight but we don’t really worry too much about what is going on outside. We just focus on getting things right on the field. That is all that matters.’
The rest is only talk.