Relieved Fitzgerald hails his maturing young fighters

Davy Fitzgerald admitted this Clare team have already surpassed his expectations after winning through to the county’s first All-Ireland semi-final since 2006.

Nine of his panel will be involved in the county’s U21 Munster final against Tipperary on Wednesday week and he was delighted they had proven people wrong once more since their Munster semi-final defeat to Cork.

“Every time we got hit with a blow. I’m looking out at these lads and probably nine of these lads are under 22 years of age. They just amaze me. To be at this stage with this team, my own personal view was that it would take them another year or two to get there. To get where they are is unreal,” he said.

“They’ve exceeded my wildest expectations and we have a day out. I was coming down the road this morning, coming from the gym and I was driving down to meet the boys. I saw the Clare flags and the fellas togged out. It’s the first time in a long time I felt, this is great, that they’re going to do that.”

Fitzgerald cut a more relieved figure than an ecstatic one after yesterday’s victory and thanked those among the Clare support who had backed them over the last couple of months.

“The team is about work ethic, hard work. All I can do is praise my boys. They were brilliant today. Did we make things hard for ourselves? What’s new with us? We made things hard but maybe that’s better, that we can get the shots like that and deal with them. And we dealt with them. Fair play to them.

“I’d like to thank all the well-wishes we got in the last week or two. People around the country have taken to the team because they’re so young. I’d like to thank them for that. Our obituary was written a long time ago, all of us, we’re still there.”

Fitzgerald paid particular respect to sub Cathal McInerney whose grandfather died on Friday.

“Cathal McInerney showed great character out there. His grandfather only passed away two days ago and he did his memory proud.”

Wexford caught Clare with a sucker-punch goal to force extra-time in their previous game but here they endured both second-half Galway goals to see out the game.

“We’ve talked about those situations and scenarios,” said Fitzgerald. “It’s important to respond. Even the day of the Cork game, you take the amount of chances we missed. We kept fighting.

“People didn’t see it but we were fighting. We just didn’t get the breaks. We got the breaks today. It shows you — the Championship is probably wide open.”

Fitzgerald wouldn’t budge on the subject of facing the neighbours on August 18. “We’ll leave that during the week and think about it. My mother’s a Limerick woman. I’ve massive respect for what they’ve done. We’ll be trying to beat them, they’ll be trying to beat us. I don’t think there will be much in it. That occasion in Dublin will be something special. We’ll be going in as underdogs, which isn’t too bad for us. But we’ll be fighting hard — we have a bunch of fighters.”