Déise players deserve some credit too
You just have to press the button and you have your front or back page shot for the next day’s papers: the two boys will do the rest.
They both jumped the wire in Pairc Uí Chaoimh to salute the terraces after their wins over Tipperary in 2002 and 2004. When they first won Munster, Mullane jumped on Justin McCarthy’s back. When they won it again in 2004 with 14 men and without him, Mullane shed tears while declaring his love for Waterford.
When they won through to the All-Ireland final in 2008, an ecstatic Kelly and family members were pictured embracing on the field while Mullane and his manager Davy Fitzgerald rolled around on the ground together surrounded by flashbulbs.
On Sunday, Kelly was once again euphoric and Mullane’s knees again got dirtied in front of the dugout in the post-match celebrations, only this time he came to taunt Fitzgerald, not to party with him.
It was an unseemly gesture, because Fitzgerald deserved better for all he did with Waterford, but it was also a revealing statement that spoke louder than it could ever have been articulated: this current set of Waterford players have deserved better too. Every triumph and achievement of theirs over the last four years seemed to be attributed to their manager. It wouldn’t have been lost on the players how often the line was pedalled that Waterford had reached the last four All-Ireland semi-finals.
Why mention just the four, they’d have wondered, when it should have read the last six semi-finals, since they’d played into August in ‘06 and ‘07 as well? Even in his dignified post-match interview to RTÉ’s Clare McNamara, Fitzgerald couldn’t avoid a subtle form of self-congratulation in referring to how Waterford had been “probably the number-three team in the country for a number of years”.
The inference was he had established them as that, overlooking the fact that with the exceptions of 2003 and 2005 they’ve had such a lofty end-of-season ranking for close to a decade.
Fitzgerald’s achievement was to maintain that line of form but sometimes he and his media sympathisers would nearly have you believe that he initiated it.
Neither would some Waterford players have been impressed by the level of scrutiny Michael Ryan was subjected to by some of Fitzgerald’s closest media allies before the man had even managed his first championship game, as if trying to ratchet up the pressure — and Fitzgerald’s achievements — further.
Ryan has displayed an enormous integrity and lack of ego in how he has handled himself and his team in recent months. He knows you don’t have to know everything about hurling, only how to handle hurlers, to coach hurlers. He is happy to delegate and let Ken McGrath take the coaching and blending the best of all Justin and Davy and Gerald taught him through the years.
So when Mullane and Kelly dashed in front of the Clare dugout on Sunday, they were sending out a message to everyone, and especially Fitzgerald: the resistance, the dream, goes on. We might have won with you but it shouldn’t have been all about you. We won before you and we’re winning after you’re gone now too. That’s eight Munster finals now in 10 years. Managers might help us but they come and go; we’re still here. !
Unlike Mullane and Kelly, however, we come to praise Davy, not to mock him. That Waterford remain so competitive is part of his legacy. For a few years there he was exactly what Waterford needed. He is exactly what Clare need at the moment. And as Liam Sheedy pointed out after The Sunday Game showed a shamefully selective item on Fitzgerald’s sideline antics, hurling needs Fitzgerald too.
It is not that he’s aneither-love-him-or-love-him figure; this column certainly doesn’t fall into either camp. It’s that he genuinely loves hurling and is one of its great thinkers as well as characters.
Of course you’d like to see him a tad more respectful of others, including officialdom, but he had a point after his team’s league semi-final defeat that referees seem to favour and be slightly daunted by the bigger teams, while he deserves more respect himself.
Some websites were questioning what has Fitzgerald andinter-county hurling come to following the revelation that the week before that league semi-final, Fitzgerald had his team climb Carrantuohill in the dark after already undergoing a fitness test and club league games earlier the same day.
Have they not heard about how the Cork footballers attributed their 2010 September success to a similarly testing weekend in Bere Island earlier that year? Clare are going the right direction under the right man because he’s pointing out the path to them. It’s just with Waterford, that was already done for him. That’s what Mullane and Kelly were pointing out to him on Sunday.
* kieranshannon@eircom.net
