Liam Dunne: Jack Guiney can’t give Wexford required commitment

The Wexford hurling management and players want Jack Guiney more than he wants to be part of the county set-up, manager Liam Dunne has claimed.

The 22-year old has been dropped from the panel for consuming alcohol on a night out in the wake of Wexford’s Leinster quarter-final win over Westmeath, with Dunne yesterday asserting that the team is bigger than any one individual.

Guiney was substituted in their championship opener on Sunday week last and Dunne appeared to criticise the right-half forward in his post-match assessment: “We took guys off and they weren’t taken off because they were getting a rest.”

Guiney attended training last Tuesday, but was excused from the Thursday session after management learned he had been on a night out. Guiney’s forced departure represents a significant blow ahead of Sunday’s Leinster semi-final clash away to Kilkenny.

“With this group, there are no rules. I’ve said it before that I don’t make rules because rules are there to be broken. I don’t make rules for anybody, but we set standards and the players set standards as they go along,” Dunne told South East Radio.

“Players buy into it. If you don’t want to come up to that standard or you can’t give the commitment that is required, this set-up is nowhere for you to be. At the moment, Jack [Guiney] just can’t give that commitment.

“I’d love to have Jack Guiney in here with us, the players would love to have Jack Guiney in, the management would love to have Jack Guiney, but I am not sure that Jack wants it so much as we want him. He is a young man and unfortunately I am the manager of the team, I have to make tough decisions, whether they be right or wrong, but in the betterment of the team you have to treat 33 guys the very same, no matter who you are. I think the team is bigger than any one individual.”

Former Kilkenny hurler JJ Delaney believes management were correct in dropping Guiney.

“If I was on the Wexford panel at the moment and he had done that, I probably wouldn’t want him on the panel anyway. I wouldn’t want him on the team because he made a choice himself of what he was going to do. It’s an unfortunate situation but you see with the Laois team a couple of weeks ago something like that could galvanise the rest of the panel as well. It can hurt players but they have to take the positives out of it and say ‘right, we know what we have. The rest of the panel didn’t do it so we’ll just go ahead now and tackle what’s put in front of us’.”

Meanwhile, Offaly hurling coach Damien Fox has quit the Faithful set-up. Fox, who was brought onto the management ticket by Brian Whelehan at the outset of the 2015 campaign, expressed discontentment about his role at a players meeting in the wake of Offaly’s eight-point defeat to Laois in the Leinster quarter-final.