Davy: Nepotism won’t influence Clare job

DAVY FITZGERALD insists his father and Clare secretary Pat will have nothing to do with him ever being appointed as senior hurling manager.

Speaking on WLR FM radio yesterday after leaving Waterford, Fitzgerald stressed he did not talk to Clare nor Galway, two counties he has been linked with, before deciding to step down from the Déise job.

“Naturally, you’d like to work with your dad but the one thing I can assure you is that I’d be fairly certain my dad would have very little to do with the appointment and I wouldn’t want it if I ever decided to go to Clare.”

Fitzgerald believes outgoing selectors Pat Bennett and Páraic Fanning and his former assistants Maurice Geary and Peter Queally, who worked with him for three and a half years, can take over from him.

“I really thank the lads for that. They were honest lads and in my opinion any one of these four would be more than capable of managing Waterford. Any of them are up to it.”

Fitzgerald also had a thinly-veiled dig at his statisticians who heavily criticised him at the end of last season.

“The one thing I have to say is I got it right this year. I got people that knew what they were doing and had experience in the game, which was very important to me.”

Fitzgerald made a staunch defence of his tenure, pointing out Waterford continued to reach Munster finals and All-Ireland semi-finals despite being in transition.

“You’re after changing a team in maybe two or three years. Normally it could take a county maybe 10 years to change a team as we’ve seen with Clare, Offaly and Wexford who still haven’t come back from replacing their good players.

“We have replaced players and stayed at the top which I think is very important and I’m very proud of that achievement which myself and the lads have done.”

Fitzgerald also categorically denied he verbally abused referee James Owens in this year’s league game against Tipperary. “The suspension, I think, everybody knows I didn’t say the stuff I was accused of saying but I didn’t make a song and dance of it, I took my suspension [four weeks] and that was it.”

Fitzgerald, who took over in June 2008, said he was disappointed former Waterford player Dan Shanahan had “had a go’ at him in the way that he had, though he added that Shanahan had never caused any trouble.

“Dan knows 100% I didn’t blackguard him. His legs were going. That’s a fact. Would I have loved Dan to be the way he was in 2007? Absolutely. He would have been one of the first in your team.”

Fitzgerald defended his action of successfully lobbying the county board to postpone club championship fixtures prior to this year’s Munster final.

“When the league ended we gave up a month to club championship. I believe clubs have to play and all the lads felt (that) coming into the Limerick game because we had given up a month we had gone back a lot.

“If they played football that week we would probably have had two hard training sessions before the Munster final. It wouldn’t have been enough.”

“We weren’t doing it to get at football clubs. I have as much respect for football as hurling. If the football had been played another week we’d have asked for the hurling to be called off.”