Much more to Davy than simple love and hate

Look at just how the bullied kid is doing now

One cliché we’ve never understood is this idea that Davy Fitzgerald is a love-or-hate figure.

Apparently there’s no place between the two; either you’re mad about the boy or you’re mad at the boy; for or against him.

It’s not like that though, as much as Davy himself might think so.

Take Donal Óg Cusack. By Davy’s own admission, they wouldn’t have “any great relationship”, but the Clare man recently said that he thinks the Corkman’s level of analysis has added to The Sunday Game’s coverage.

Last week in his terrifically insightful weekly website column, Cusack returned the grudging, but undoubted respect. While he confessed that himself and Fitzgerald would have had no interest in having a cup of tea together, his admiration for Fitzgerald’s fire and ice was gushing.

Back in 1999, just weeks before Cusack would make his senior championship debut, he took up a place in the terraces to study both Fitzgerald and Brendan Cummins for one of those epic Clare-Tipp do-or-die tussles that used to pack and rock the old bowl by the Lee.

Cusack would finish that year with Liam MacCarthy and indeed the All Star but by his own admission it should have gone to Fitzgerald for his display that day and that season. His ability to win dropping ball just below his crossbar with the sun in his eyes and a baying crowd at his back; to then stop a goal at one end before then going up to score a goal himself at the other in the last minute to earn Clare a replay; it was a master at work who the student Cusack observed that day.

A lot of fair-minded people would be like Cusack when it comes to Fitzgerald, this writer included. I first interviewed him before the 1997 Munster final and he was courtesy and generosity personified. We didn’t really have many dealings after that for a decade until his controversial dispute with Tony Considine.

Shortly after Considine was fired after a farcical county board meeting I had attended, a mutual acquaintance of mine and Fitzgerald’s contacted me. Apparently Davy wasn’t happy with some of my commentary on the saga — just as Tony wouldn’t have been either — and he wanted to meet just to brief me off the record on his version of things.

We met, and while we talked about his annus horribilis that was 2007, we talked about a whole lot more. He shirked nothing: why he did this and why he did that, why he was no longer on such great terms with this person and that person; his preparation as a player and as a coach.

We ended up there for over four hours, yet it flew. One thing that struck me was that for such a young man he had fallen out with a lot of people but the most overriding impression was of a man with exceptional foresight and detail and passion for the game, detailing even then the tactical game he has Clare playing now and how players could train like professionals in an amateur sport.

The following spring he would both return and retire as a player. At the time I wrote: “Last Tuesday wasn’t a sad day. It was a good one because it hastens the day he becomes an intercounty manager. He will make an outstanding one. The bib he craves, of course, is the Clare one, but it will be a while before he gets it; the wounds of last year’s civil war have not sufficiently healed. In the meantime he’ll probably lead a Dublin or Offaly back to All-Ireland quarter- and semi-finals.”

It took only a few months before he’d get that inter-county job. As it turned out, it would be Waterford he would lead to All Ireland semi-finals, and indeed finals. With that good, came some bad, some of which we wrote about that wouldn’t have pleased him.

Being critical of Fitzgerald has never meant disliking him, though. Of course he continues to do things you might dislike. The constant barraging of officials is unseemly. His refusal to attend Clare’s All-Ireland final press day smacked more of arrogance than a man burned by the experience of Waterford’s five years ago.

Maybe some of his near-paranoia along with our continuing admiration for him stems from the fact he was routinely bullied as a kid. On the school bus, the bullies at the back once threw his shoes, shirt and jumper out the window outside his house.

Another time they invited him to play soccer — only to give him a good kicking before taking him into another room to kick him some more. Hurling became his refuge, his revenge — “none of the hard men made it,” he’d observe in his autobiography — his identity.

Look at just how the bullied kid is doing now, how he has this Clare team playing and playing for him. At 41 he has already qualified for five All-Ireland semi-finals. You’ve got to give it to him.

Even Tony Considine does. You may (neither) hate or love Davy Fitzgerald but you have to admire him.