Fitzgerald’s big ‘Park’ day
“There’d be a group of us, myself, Niall McCarthy and Noelie Furlong, who would have been in the same class and then Jason Barrett and Niall Kidney who is a selector, they would have been a year ahead of us in school.
“We would all have hung around together and I suppose hurling was our life from a very young age. It was the only thing to do in Carrigtwohill. If you go back to national school you would have Ger Foley, who is still in the school. He was a great help and that was the start of a new set up inside there. We were just lucky to have had five or six good fellows, a base to start from.”
It was a bumpy start. The first year Fitzgerald played in Sciath na Scoil he and his pals got a hammering from a north Cork school powered by twin brothers: Ben and Jerry O’Connor.
Still, he progressed through U14, 15 and 16 sides with Cork, winning a minor All-Ireland in 1998 with Niall McCarthy, Ronan Curran and Eoin Fitzgerald from Castlelyons as teammates.
With Carrig, the breakthrough came in 2007, when they beat Watergrasshill in the PIHC decider.
“We lost the final in 2006,” says Fitzgerald. “And if you go back far enough we played Delanys in 2001 and they beat us in a replay. We were young then, most of us, around 19 or so and it would have been a good time to go up because we would have had a lot of years ahead of us but it just didn’t work out.
“It took us a long time to get back to where we wanted to get and we lost to Bishopstown in 2006 before winning a year later.”
The men in blue and gold had two difficult years in senior, says Fitzgerald. Being involved in relegation and things started not going our way and when you start losing games things tend to go negative.
“I was in goal in one of the relegation deciders against St Catherine’s in Midleton two years ago and I nearly lost the game when I tried to stop a ball going over the bar and a young fellow kicked it wide near the finish.”
The relegation battles two years ago were watched from the sidelines.
“I wasn’t part of the panel. I trained the minor team that year but I had a small bit of an argument, a disagreement more than an argument, because I didn’t buy into what was happening. I suppose I asked myself during those games why didn’t you swallow it but something got at me and it hurt and I couldn’t accept it.’’
Then a keeper, Fitzgerald, along with Niall McCarthy, is now one of Carrig’s key forwards.
“The reason I went into goal was that I got lazy. I suppose I then got up off my ass, did a bit of winter training and caught the bug again and things came back to me.’’ He knew the mindset had changed when their first-round win wasn’t commemorated with a drinking session.
“While we won, we were disappointed which was a good thing really because before if we won a first round game we’d be celebrating for a month.
“That was a good sign when we didn’t, myself included, celebrate afterwards. I suppose we used do that kind of thing, we had a few rogues around, not naming any, not naming myself but we did enjoy life but we were good to train too, more so this year and last year. With us you need to get things right, we are that kind of a group and James O’Connor has done a great job. He’s very professional and the players have responded to him.
“We had good men before him as well but he’s brought it to a new level. He’s an intercounty coach really.’’ And now it’s CIT. They’ve waited “I suppose if you said to me that we’d be in a senior final 10 years ago, I would have said yes, but five years ago? No.
“But now I think our older lads have got a new lease of life.
“I suppose our defence has been magnificent this year but on Sunday we’ll be coming up against six very good forwards whereas in previous games we had three or four guys that we could pinpoint as being dangerous.”
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