Masterson desperate to put big ball on Wexford map

SET a ruler down horizontally through the market town of Gorey and you more or less divide the county of Wexford into its hurling and footballing heartlands.

Anything north of that point and the likelihood is that the local GAA club prefers to use a big ball. Anything south of it and they will probably lean towards the ash and sliotar but hurling’s influence, its hold, is everywhere.

Anthony Masterson will tell you that.

The Wexford goalkeeper was born and reared in football country. He won his first senior football county medal with Castletown last year, following in the footsteps of his father who was on most of the teams that won the club’s nine previous titles between 1965 and 1981.

Football is the passion in their parish, hurling the pastime and something Masterson and others dabble in with the Liam Mellows club, but even in Castletown they find it difficult to escape the sense that they are second-class citizens.

The county hurlers — for all their failures in modern times — are like the bad son who can do no wrong in the eyes of doting parents. Football is the diligent, obedient one who, no matter what he does, will never be the apple of their eye.

It’s a truth that manifests itself on the terraces and in the stands whenever the senior sides play and one that was evidenced earlier this summer when most of the 16,000 people who flooded into Wexford Park did so to see Colm Bonnar’s side lose to Kilkenny.

Watching Jason Ryan’s lads hammer Westmeath in the first game was a bonus but little more for many. Hurling is hurling and football is, well, superfluous to many of Masterson’s kin who will follow tomorrow’s Leinster final against Dublin dispassionately.

“Our own people don’t believe we’re good enough,” he said. “It’s been in the back of our minds for all our lives growing up like that. There was 96 and I was going to hurling matches all my life. I was going to the odd football match and that’s what you grew up with.”

The footballers can hardly be faulted in their attempts to eradicate old prejudices. They have reached a league final, a Leinster decider and an All-Ireland semi-final in the last half-dozen years but loyalties turn like oil tankers — slowly and with great difficulty.

“Football, I tell you, even if we won a Leinster title it still wouldn’t overtake hurling,” said Masterson.

“Wexford have to go on and win a couple of All-Ireland football titles and maybe a couple of Leinster football titles for it to overtake hurling. It’s just the way it is.”

Supporters need to be made believe but then so too do the players, according to Masterson, who has been part of a Wexford team that twice held their own against Dublin before caving in.

In 2008, they trailed Pat Gilroy’s side by just three points at half time in the provincial decider but lost by 23. They led the Dubs byseven points in last summer’s Leinster quarter-final before succumbing by the same margin after extra-time.

“It’s a different feeling to 2008,” said the goalkeeper who earned an All Star nomination that year.

“2008 was Jason’s first year, it was my first year, a lot of lads were immature coming into the Leinster final and it was probably more about the day than anything else.

“We’ve done a lot of learning over the last three or four years. We’re definitely sure about what we’re going to do this year. We’re aiming to win it and nothing else.”

One of those lessons was put to good use after this year’s semi-final defeat of Carlow, when some of the newer faces on the panel began contemplating pre-match parades and the like attached to big days like tomorrow.

Masterson and the other vets from 08 soon knocked that talk out of them but he isn’t averse to projecting his own mind forward to what it would mean if his clubmate Colm Morris was to walk up the Hogan Stand steps and collect the Delaney Cup.

“It would mean more for Wexford football than it does for Dublin football but that doesn’t mean we have a right to win it. Every time you read about Dublin they’re talking about winning an All-Ireland title. For Wexford, a Leinster title is an All-Ireland title.

“What it would do for this county would be unbelievable. Castletown won a county title for the first time in 29 or 30 years last year and what it did for the club was unbelievable. What it could do for the whole county if we could win a Leinster title, it would be untold of.”