Paraic Mahony won’t lose Waterford focus

If betting is an indicator, to see Waterford’s undefeated league run is to believe it, writes John Fogarty. 

No longer regarded as the whipping boys of Munster, they have been replaced by Clare and Limerick as the least favoured to lift the provincial crown.

That may have as much to do with the fact those neighbours face at least three games to claim it but Derek McGrath’s Waterford had at one stage propped up the betting earlier this season much like they were last year.

Their Division 1B run and victories over Galway and Tipperary have changed a lot but not for Paraic Mahony. When Waterford are annexing Munster titles or reaching All-Ireland finals or even winning them like their Munster brethren then he’ll justify the county’s move in the markets. Until then, he won’t.

“At the end of the day we are probably the fifth team in Munster,” he says. “You’re judged on championship and we had a bad one last year. Cork are Munster champions, Limerick were a puck of ball from them, they could have beaten Cork and beaten Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final. Obviously, Clare are 2013 champions and Tipp were a puck of a ball from winning the All-Ireland last year when we were in a relegation league so it’s probably where we are realistically.

“But this is a new year, we’ve a good young team and we feel we’re going in the right direction. Derek wanted to stamp his own authority on the team last year and maybe it’s only now that we’re seeing the benefits of it.”

It’s not that Mahony is playing the poor mouth: he knows what it’s like to live with expectation and live up to it. Earlier this year, county chairman Paddy Joe Ryan said a swift return to Division 1A was a priority. Only McGrath and his players thought otherwise. “We knew at the start of the season when the chairman outlined that one of the main aims was to get back to 1A but we didn’t see it that way. We wanted to prepare ourselves as best as possible coming into the championship and just to win as many league games as we could. Now that we’re in the league final, we couldn’t get better preparation than that.”

Looking back, there were two stand-out moments for Mahony where he felt Waterford were making the right noises. “The Limerick game the first day when we had a great start and then they came back and got in front of us. Over the last number of years, we would have probably folded in that situation and we got the last score of the game to draw and that kept our league up. Then obviously the Tipperary game where we were seven points down having conceded two early goals. In the 2011 Munster final, they got the two early goals and went on to get seven goals but we managed to shut the door the last day so that was probably a good sign for the team.”

Sunday is one of two examinations in the space of three days for 22-year-old Mahony as he begins his business finals in WIT this day week. In what could easily be billed as a face-off with Pa Horgan, Waterford will look to him to be as impressive as ever from frees.

He thanks former Waterford selector Nicky Cashin with providing him with a useful tip during his underage years. “He just said, ‘visualisation — when you get a free, just visualise it over the bar before you hit the free because you can’t be nervous then if you’re hitting the free if it’s already over the bar’. That’s one piece of advice I’ve always carried with me.”

Looking to Sunday’s final with Cork, Mahony is treating it in isolation. Nothing to do with revenge for last year’s Munster quarter-final defeat, nor the counties’ semi-final clash in just over five weeks at the same venue.

However, he would like to think they are now in a better position to stay on top of Cork if they find themselves in a similar position again. “If you look back to the (drawn) Cork game last year, our intensity in the first half was serious and I think we really bottled Cork up. That’s what we’ve been trying to do this year — get back to where we were that day. We played some great hurling in that first match against Cork but it was obviously our intensity that got us into that position. Everybody was under the illusion we should have kicked on.

“We were nine points up and we certainly felt we left it behind. We didn’t show up really at all so that was very disappointing. But at the same time we can take belief from that drawn game that we can beat Cork.”