GALWAY CAN HANDLE THE PRESSURE
WHEN did Paul Morris realise Wexford had achieved something special? Maybe 20 minutes after the final whistle. Along with Harry Kehoe, he had just given his thoughts on the seismic win over Kilkenny to South East Radio and the forwards were scrambling down the back of the stand, when they stood still for a moment, simply to drink in the scenes below them.
The pitch was black with Wexford people, young and old. ‘I just said to Harry: “look at the pitch”. It was unbelievable. All you could see were supporters, everywhere. Great scenes. Wexford people have just been screaming out for success.’
Morris had never experienced a night like it. None of them had. In his first six summers playing for the Model County, there was the odd big win, the occasional whispered promise of better days ahead. He was among those players who made the country sit up and take notice in 2014, when they dethroned Davy Fitzgerald’s Clare after two epic tussles.
But even that magical evening didn’t compare to the emotion that flooded Wexford Park a few weeks ago.
‘I suppose 2014 was when Wexford and our players became a little more well-known to the general public,’ Morris accepts. ‘We had a few good games that year, drawing with Clare in Ennis and beating them in Wexford Park, beating Waterford in Nowlan Park. That was the first time this group of players were put on the hurling map as such.
‘We knew we had potential all the way up and it is a question that lingers over me and a good few lads; why didn’t we always get the best out of ourselves? Why were we inconsistent? It was disappointing we didn’t follow up in 2014 but look at this stage, there is no point in looking back at what might have been. You can only look forward.’
There are clues in Morris’ past for what was to come this summer, though. Born and raised in Ferns, a couple of miles from Wexford GAA’s fine centre of excellence, he went to school in FCJ Bunclody and was their main attacking weapon when they claimed the AllIreland B Colleges title in 2007 (Shane Tomkins was also on the team), under Rory Kinsella, Liam Griffin’s righthand man in 1996.
Morris scored eight points as they beat Cross & Passion of Antrim in that final. Kinsella remembers him as their main force. ‘Even when he was younger, you could see that he had that bit of class,’ the former Wexford manager recalls.
Morris was only 20 when Colm Bonnar handed him his first Championship start, against Galway in 2010. It didn’t go so well and he had to wait until Liam Dunne took over to establish himself as a Wexford forward.
Although, like many, Morris has come into his own under Davy Fitzgerald, he credits Dunne with turning him into a county player.
‘Liam had a massive influence on my career,’ Morris explains. ‘I had him as my manager at under16 level, at minor and then at senior level. I have worked with him for seven or eight years. I have a huge amount of time for him and he is one of the guys I grew up looking at as one of the kingpins of Wexford hurling.’
While he was always a sweet striker of the ball and good for scores, he needed work on the more blue-collar aspects of his game. Hooking, blocking, winning dirty ball. ‘But he clearly has, as you can see this year. And like all the players, he is in serious condition,’ Kinsella says.
Morris played Fitzgibbon Cup hurling with DIT but he is back home, working with Future Nutrition, a supplements firm based in Enniscorthy. Involved in sales, he spends a lot of time travelling to the UK, Germany and Sweden. For a county hurler, that takes planning.
‘If we were training on the Wednesday evening one week, and I knew I had to go to Sweden, I would try to get away on the Sunday evening and be back the Wednesday morning.
‘Davy’s very accommodating, as Liam was. Your job is your job. It will be paying the bills long after we stop hurling.’
Morris accepts that county players may now be more wary following the ingestion of a contaminated supplement by Kerry’s Brendan O’Sullivan, but, as one who works in the industry, he explains the protocol. ‘There is a company called Informed Sport, who test all supplements for banned substances. So any supplement that has their stamp has passed all the quality control programmes.’
There has been no foreign travel in recent weeks. It is all about Wexford. Morris’s team have to find a way past one of the most physicallyimposing sides ever today but with everything else that has happened this year, you wouldn’t put
it past them.