Young pretender Fitzy is ‘coolness personified’ for Bridge

FITZY, Fitzy!”, the cry going up in the triumphant Sixmilebridge dressing-room, after yesterday’s heart-stopping injury-time win over Blackrock.

For once however, it wasn’t for long-time hero Davy Fitzgerald, but a young pretender, Paul Fitzpatrick, late sub and scorer of the last-gasp point that takes The Bridge into the Munster final in two week’s time, against Mount Sion of Waterford in Thurles.

“That lad has more hurling in him”, the ‘old’ Fitzy explained about the new; “he was centre-back on our U-21 team, and he’d make nearly any senior club team in the country. There was pressure on him for that last point, but it didn’t matter, he’s just coolness personified, pressure would never bother that lad. If you watch his hurling, his touch is just fantastic, and when he got that ball, I had no doubt it was going over.”

The Sixmilebridge keeper then went on to pay tribute to the opposition. “Blackrock were a very good side, the calibre of the players they had, their fighting spirit was unbelievable. We were in trouble at times, but you’re always going to hit rough patches in games, we did, and we got over them. The one thing we said was to battle to the very end and we did that, that’s why we came out on top”.

In that same dressing-room, respectful silence then a huge cheer for Blackrock manager Timmy Murphy, as he offered his view on the game, and his congratulations to the winners. “It wasn’t that we got off to a bad start, it was that ye got off to a great start, and ye carried it through to the final whistle. We were a bit unlucky perhaps that it didn’t end up in a draw. But we have no complaints whatsoever, the match is there to be won , and ye stuck in there to the final whistle, found enough spirit and enough pride in yereselves to find that winning point.”

Later, Timmy expanded on the Blackrock performance. “We gave it everything we could, just couldn’t get our noses in front at the end, but we made it difficult for ourselves by the fact that we conceded scores at the start of both halves. They’re a big, strong, physical side, we found it hard to deal with that side of their game, but we played good hurling out there as well, maybe a bit unlucky to be going home with nothing. Playing well and not winning amounts to nothing”. Harsh reality.

Sixmilebridge also had something driving them on, a grievance with higher authority, as goal-scorer Niall Gilligan explained. “The one gripe we had coming in was that this game wasn’t played in Sixmilebridge. The field was put in there in 1982, there has been a lot of hard work since then, three or four lads in the club and they live down there; it would have been lovely for them, but instead we were brought to Ennis.”

Team manager Paddy Meehan expanded on that. “There is anger. I walked our own pitch this morning, and it’s in perfect shape. We’ve spent up on quarter of a million on it in a short period of time, asking club members to go out and sell lotto tickets to develop the facilities - is it all just for training? Two Munster club games were played there before, a National League game, five county delegates at Munster Council voting for us to have it at home, and still it didn’t happen. There’s something seriously wrong there. We could have easily catered for the crowd that was here today. Okay I’m a parish trader, with a business in the Bridge, but the business people in the town have helped to put that facility there, and this game would have been a great benefit to them. It wasn’t so much the players, they were quite happy to come to Cusack Park, and we were focused from the word go that it was going to be in Ennis”.

Nevertheless, even if the game wasn’t played at home, as their manager pointed out, Sixmilebridge were right at home anyway at Cusack Park. And it showed.