When Davy Fitzgerald said this year that Wexford were in bonus territory after promotion to Division 1A, very few people believed him.
The suspicion was that the ebullient Wexford manager, who could probably write a book or two on the psychology of hurling, was toning things down after a surprisingly successful spring. Sure, reaching the top flight of the league after six years away was a huge deal for a county previously in the doldrums but Fitzgerald has always been about the championship and great days under the sun.
One reporter after Wexford’s win over Offaly in early March, which secured their promotion, suggested that spring could very well be the high point of Wexford’s year. “I don’t give a shit, I swear to God, I don’t care, that was a f***ing great win,” Fitzgerald replied. “Whatever happens from here is a bonus, I still think we are miles off where we need to be and I’m telling you that straight.”
Yet, deep down, he was always targeting a Leinster semi-final showdown with Kilkenny and when Wexford duly won that game, bonus-territory talk simply did not cut it anymore. Some long-suffering fans even began to talk about Fitzgerald replacing Liam Griffin as the county’s most recent All-Ireland-winning manager.
Griffin himself would have happily passed over his mantle, yet agreed all along with Fitzgerald that this really was a Wexford team punching well above its weight and that All-Ireland talk was wildly premature. The 1996 All-Ireland-winning manager believes that the most important thing now, perhaps even more so than beating Waterford on Sunday, is that they consolidate their place in Division 1A next spring, to establish themselves as a genuine top-tier county.
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“If we’re looking to the longer game and the development of Wexford hurling and this team in particular then what happens in next season’s league is probably as important, if not more, than what happens on Sunday,” Griffin said.
“If you go back to the Leinster final, we had 60,000 people at it and the majority of them from Wexford. If we want to satisfy all those people and keep them interested in this team, we’re going to have to stay in Division 1A.
“We need to give those people great games between Wexford and Kilkenny, between Wexford and Tipperary, between Wexford and Cork and to have those teams coming to our home.
“That’s important to keep the groundswell of children and supporters with us, that they don’t fall away. That appetite has always been there but unfortunately we weren’t satisfying it for a good few years. That’s the way I’m looking at it, doing well on Sunday would be great but Division 1A is the really important thing now.”
Griffin describes Wexford’s season to date as a giant overachievement. They have lost only two games and beaten Galway, Limerick and Kilkenny, twice, at various stages in Fitzgerald’s first year in charge yet Griffin feels that it is not a reliable indicator of their standing in the game.
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“When you get 60,000 people turning up for a Wexford game and when you have the whole county buzzing about hurling, the pressure comes on to perform,” Griffin said. “But people have to cut the players some slack and let reality take hold — we have overachieved all year.
“I was pleasantly surprised at the way we started the Leinster final against Galway and I think we could have been closer to Galway. But did I ever think we were going to beat them? I didn’t. I said that before the game and I’m saying it now: we weren’t going to beat Galway.
“They’re a side that’s been in Leinster and All-Ireland finals consistently in the last few years and has beaten Tipperary in a brilliant semi-final in 2015 and came up just a point short of Tipp last year.
“You can say whatever you want about Galway’s frailties but they’re an impressive team with top-level experience and I just didn’t see Wexford beating them.”
The bad news for Wexford fans is that Griffin’s instinct is telling him something similar about this weekend. Waterford have been mixing it at a high level themselves for a number of seasons under Derek McGrath and last year buried Wexford by ten points at this stage of the Championship.
All change at Wexford
National League, Division 1B
Played 6, Won 2, Lost 4
Leinster Championship
Played 1, Lost 1
All-Ireland Championship
Played 3, Won 2, Lost 1
Win rate from ten games
40 per cent
National League, Division 1B
Played 7, Won 6, Lost 1 (Promotion to Division 1A)
Leinster Championship
Played 3, Won 2, Lost 1 (Leinster finalists)
Win rate after ten games
80 per cent
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“My sense is that I think Waterford are going to win it but that Wexford will put it to them,” Griffin said. “We’ve a few injured players and nobody is really talking about that but I think it’s significant. I’d love to have Liam Óg McGovern, Andrew Shore and David Dunne there, they’d really strengthen our panel. Again, looking to the future, it might be more important that we have those guys back for next year.”
It remains to be seen what sort of psychological impact the Leinster final defeat had on the Wexford players. Cian O’Neill, the Kildare football manager, insisted that his players were not scarred by their defeat by Dublin and neither should Wexford, having looked the equal of Galway for half an hour.
“I don’t think it will have done them any damage at all,” Griffin said. “The core of the team comes from those three under-21 teams that won Leinster titles in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and because those sides never actually won All-Irelands I think there’s a strong ambition among them to win silverware now as seniors.
“They’ve got a taste of what it’s like, the big occasion, Croke Park. I think that will stand to them and they’ll be itching to get back there, as opposed to being broken by the experience.
“I’d be surprised if they didn’t give a really good performance and if they do that and just come up a bit short they can head back down the road for home with their heads held high.”