Déise will be in September shake-up, warns selector Fanning

THERE are those who believe that, come the first Sunday in September, and as happened for past two years, that the All-Ireland championship will again come down again to just two teams, Tipperary and Kilkenny.

It’s a view with which Waterford selector Pauric Fanning would like to take issue.

“We don’t believe that,” he says, after a weekend in which 13-man Waterford, already shorn of 11 front-liners, put up a heroic display against Tipperary in Thurles. Fanning’s side lost by just five points, the same margin that separated the sides when goalkeeper Clinton Hennessey became the second Waterford player to receive a straight red card. Fanning continued: “We believe we’ll have a big say (in the championships) we’re not going to back down from that. We believe in ourselves — we have a very good dressing room, a very positive dressing room and if anyone thinks we’re going to go through the motions, we’re not.

“Tipperary walked out of Thurles with two points — we didn’t. Where it is good for us is that we proved we have talent, and there is a lot of talent coming through in Waterford. We believe in ourselves and I don’t believe that it’s a two-horse race (to win the All-Ireland). If you want to take a moral victory out of it (you can) but there’s plenty there for us to build on and believe me, we’ll build on it. We’ll go back to training and we’ll train hard again next week, we’ll train hard right up to the summer. We have everything mapped out we know what we want to do and that’s to become the best we can.”

He has every reason to feel bullish. An almost full-strength Tipperary were pushing with everything they had in the quest for their first points of this league, their first competitive win of the 2011 season, the first win for the new management team led by Declan Ryan, yet Waterford went toe-to-toe with them for that last half-hour.

“Thirteen men against the All-Ireland champions — I thought we did most of the hurling in the second half,” Fanning continued. “It became very hard to break them down and get the final pass because of the numbers they had at the back. But we’re very proud of the lads. We have the De La Salle lads back next week, more depth to our panel now than we had last year.”