The Kieran Shannon interview: Always rooting for the underdog
Leading light: Waterford manager Ephie Fitzgerald during the McGrath Cup Group A match against his native Cork in Páirc Uí Rinn. What does he think of where Cork are now? “Look,” he smiles, “no matter what I say it’ll be seen by some as just sour grapes. But of course I still have views on Cork football and a passion for it.
Just like with the boy named Sue that Johnny Cash sang about, perhaps there was a logic afterall behind why they called him what they did.
To everyone in football he’s simply and affectionately known as Ephie but before the streets of Turner Cross got a hold of it and mercifully abbreviated it, the name on his birth cert read Ephraim. His great grandmother was a very religious woman and yearned to call a child by that name. But after her own son died upon birth she’d wait naming someone after the grandson of Jacob until her own great grandson came along.
In Hebrew the name Ephraim means fruitfulness. According to the book of Genesis, Joseph, he of the famous technicolour dreamcoat, named his youngest son thus because in his own eyes he himself had been fruitful “in the land of my suffering”. At a time when it was the custom to give your eldest son your paternal blessing, Joseph instead opted for Ephraim over Manasseh on account of his greater modesty and selflessness.
So it has being with a certain Mr Fitzgerald.
He hails from one of football’s greatest bloodlines – Nemo, Chríost Rí, Cork. When he was overlooked for the Cork job following Brian Cuthbert’s departure Billy Morgan pointed out that no one in the race had been more fruitful when it came to mounting up silverware. And yet Fitzgerald will stress that winning isn’t what really motivates him (“I honestly don’t know where my medals are”), just as his willingness to follow Éamonn Ryan as Cork ladies manager showed he’s not afraid to fail either; he takes as much pride in some of the years Cork didn’t win the All Ireland as he does in 2016 when they did.
For him football, like his work and life, is about the journey, or more so, helping others along theirs, the bonds you form with them, the growth you see from them. It’s why he coaches teams like the Waterford footballers and why he still has the job he has. “I suppose,” he says, “I have a bit of a thing for the underdog.”
For the past 40 years Ephraim Fitzgerald has modestly and selflessly worked in the service of others in the land of their suffering. When he himself left UCC with a HDip to go with his BA in history and economics, jobs were scarce so when his mother was passing the St Francis training centre in town and saw they were looking for teachers to work with those the school system had already rejected or those that had rejected the school system, Fitzgerald duly enquired. He’d stay there for quarter of a century until moving to the Glen and more recently out to Mahon where he similarly helps roll out a Youthreach programme, one of 25 or so across the country. Young people ranging from 15 to 21 years old can avail of vocational training and attain QQI certification to put them back on track to progress to further education, training and employment.
“For this kind of work you need a lot of patience and a lot of empathy. You’re looking at their personal development as much as the academic side because if the school system has failed them it’s for a reason. It might not necessarily be the fault of the school. The kid might be autistic. There could be issues at home. So the first thing we do is make them feel welcome.
“And generally the kids are very accepting of the others. If there was a young person coming in with a particular difficulty that might impact on the others we’d inform the others why they might be acting a bit different so the others realise they’re not doing it deliberately. I could count on one hand the amount of kids that I could say I didn’t get on with.”
He’s lost count though of those over the years who lost their way or they’d lose along the way.
“I’ve seen the whole spectrum of it. Suicide. Drugs. Early in my career we had a lot of joyriding which ended up killing people. We’ve had glue sniffing, gas sniffing, (sexual) abuse, you name it. I won’t say you get immune to it over the years but you do learn to deal with it better as you get older while the systems and reporting of matters is much better, so the tragedies thankfully aren’t as prevalent as they were before.
“Drug use has gone up alright. Hash would now be seen as the same as just smoking a fag; they wouldn’t take a lot of notice of that. Cocaine is there. We’ve had heroin users though not to any great degree. But if you walk through the city here, the amount of young people who are homeless or drug addicts is frightening.”
So, yes, he’s literally seen the dead bodies but he’s seen plenty of successful, redemptive stories too. Former pupils, now in their 40s, with their own jobs, families, PLC or even third-level qualifications. He’s watched and still watches the formerly expelled, the troubled, a large number of the traveller community bloom right in front of him, finding their voice from being given a voice. Fitzgerald teaches practical subjects like communications (“English, essentially”) and teamworking (“We’ve just done a project on refugees in Ireland”) and workplace safety but more so he’s teaching soft, vital skills like leadership, confidence, self-worth.
“There are codes of conduct that come from the ETB (Education Training and Welfare Board] but we like the kids to come up with their own rules: What do they think is acceptable? It’s student-led, as much as possible. And person-centred.
“And I suppose that’s the approach I like to take with teams too. When I see different coaches have blanket bans on drink or something else and their players can’t do this and they can’t go here, I just despair. We’re all amateurs, number one, but more importantly, we’re all human beings.
“I’ll have 20-odd fellas turning up for training tonight and I won’t know what’s going on in their heads or their lives unless I ask or care. I actually do very little coaching now. With Waterford I leave a lot of that to Peter Leahy because he’s brilliant at it but also because it frees me up to check in with the lads all the time to see if things are okay in their personal lives.
“In my time with teams over the years I’ve quite often had to refer players to different people, just to give them the help they needed. If someone is struggling, I honestly couldn’t give a shite about their football. Because while sometimes it can be a release from their struggles, in other cases it can increase the pressure on them.
“Young people nowadays have a lot to contend with. Social media can be great but everyone has a phone and if somebody else makes a negative comment about them, people can wilt because they’re so worried about what people think about them. So what I try to promote with my players and I suppose my students too is the idea that you are who you are. Be you and go out there and know you’re going to make mistakes, so long as they’re honest ones. The only thing I give about to players really is if they’re swinging the lead and not really trying hard enough. I’m often asked why with the success I’ve had with other teams I’d then go into a job like a Waterford but it goes back to that underdog thing.”
*********
Fitzgerald was reared on the power of positive nurturing. His father Edmund would not just buy his football boots but lovingly polish and dry them with rolled-up newspaper before and after every training session or game, a practice that continued right up until Ephie got married.
Like his father, Fitzgerald was very handy at soccer, playing for the likes of Casement and Avondale before being on the fringes of the Cork City setup, but the Gaelic teams he played offered something more magical.
“I loved soccer but it didn’t have that family feel we had in Chríost Rí and especially Nemo. The time and effort the likes of Kevin Cummins and Brother Colm [Taft] put into us was phenomenal. The same with the likes of Colm Murphy and Denis O’Driscoll underage in Nemo even though the team I was involved with were getting beaten every week. Then when I started making the club senior team I had Billy [Morgan] collecting me to bring me to games. He was hugely encouraging.
“The same with Jim Cremin, God rest his soul. Jim always looked out for the quiet fellas. I would have been one of them. I never drank or smoked. When I won my first county I went to the pictures that night with a buddy. The day Tadhgie Murphy got the goal to beat Kerry in ’83 [and Fitzgerald came on as a sub], I actually played a Kelleher Shield match for Nemo that evening because we were struggling to field a team with the number of lads who were out drinking and celebrating Cork winning a Munster final!
“Winning to me was very fleeting. I was lucky we won so much with Nemo [including four All-Irelands] but after a day or two they were gone. I don’t really remember matches, or at least the details of them. I remember the training together more. In school Kevin Cummins having us run down to the quarry in Blackrock and run up it three times – it was savage! The laps of the field in Nemo in the middle of winter and then bringing out the weights to do a gym session there. There was something magical about Nemo that I never got anywhere else.”
With Cork he won a couple of U21 All-Irelands before that Munster with the seniors in ’83 but by ’87 when Billy had taken over he was peripheral and had enough of being on and off the panel.
That didn’t really bother him, missing out on featuring in any of all those All-Ireland finals the county played in during Billy’s first stint, but not getting the chance to manage the county after Morgan’s second jarred all right. In the early noughties he was a selector to Morgan when the club reached three consecutive All-Ireland finals, and then after Morgan took on the Cork job again, Fitzgerald would lead Nemo to four counties in a row. He also managed the county minors for a couple of years either side of stints as a coach with Maurice Horan’s Limerick (where the county reached their first-ever All Ireland quarter-final) and Colm Collins’ Clare. You’d have thought that external experience to go with his winning resume within Cork would someday land him the senior men’s bainisteoir bib but it didn’t.
What does he think of where Cork are now? “Look,” he smiles, “no matter what I say it’ll be seen by some as just sour grapes. But of course I still have views on Cork football and a passion for it.
“I was surprised to see so many of the older lads go this past winter. Now, whether they went on their own accord or were asked to go, I don’t know, but I don’t think you can function as an intercounty team without experience. Ruairí Deane for instance is someone who strikes me as a player who would still have a lot to offer and help the county get back to being a Division One team where I told Keith [Ricken] himself at the start of the year has to be the aim within the next couple of years.
“That said, a certain patience is required. People will say we’ve been patient or at least waiting for the last 10 years as a county but the team needs to a strategy and identity as to how it wants to play. Sometimes you look at Cork and they’re free-flowing, then all of a sudden they’re far more defensive. They need to settle on that, and while you might take the odd beating and tweak things here and there, there has to be a sense of this is the way we’re going and playing.
“Cork have things going for them. They have pace. Strength and conditioning wise, they’re well off the top four or five counties. But is there talent there? Absolutely. Colm O’Rourke was very disparaging after the league game against Derry, saying they can’t solo or kick the ball properly, but to me that’s rubbish.”
Anyway, enough about Cork. He has another Munster county to be more concerned about. After briefly being part of Tom McGlinchey’s backroom team for the 2016 season only to leave it for the Cork ladies job he just couldn’t refuse, he had a sense of unfished business with Waterford football.
If you were to go by the league table, the Waterford team he took over last winter are the worst county team in the country by virtue of propping up Division Four. But sometimes the league table can lie. In all but one of their games – their last match against a Cavan team clearly in the wrong division – they were highly competitive. They drew with the other side that won promotion, Tipperary. Three of their defeats were by a mere point. Tipp are clearly better since that opening-day draw but ahead of their rematch today, again in Fraher Field, Fitzgerald knows his team are too.
“I don’t get discouraged. I would for the lads if we were getting hammered every week but we haven’t been. They’re coming along all the time. When we took over it took six weeks to get a panel together. I must have phoned 50 fellas. But we got a group of lads willing to give everything to Waterford football.”
At the moment they’ll have just enough players fit to make the 26 for Saturday evening’s game in Fraher Field. Ben Kirwan, the fantastic fly goalkeeper they discovered this spring, is out injured. So is captain Dylan Guiry. Even at the best of times this season while they’ve been training in the same magnificent WIT facilities that the county hurlers do, they wouldn’t have had enough bodies for a full 15v15 in-house game.
Yet still they’ve ploughed on, through the inventiveness of Casey’s coaching which Fitzgerald reckons is among the best in the country. More U20 hurlers will try the football if or when they’re cut. Recently Mikey Kiely dropped off the senior hurling panel and on Liam Cahill’s recommendation teamed up immediately with the footballers and has already been a huge addition.
“In Waterford the mindset has typically been I’d prefer to be on a panel of 60 for the hurling rather than 30 for the football. And that’s understandable because they’ve just won Division One whereas we’re bottom of Division Four. But I’ve given a commitment to do this for a number of years no matter what happens. The board are giving us every support they can, and the players are responding to that.
“Their football awareness has come on leaps and bounds from the games and Peter’s coaching. A lot of guys in their club are the star and so they have to do everything or at least feel they have to, then they literally carry that into the county scene and get turned over a lot more often. We need to improve a lot on the strength and conditioning. Some of the young lads would never have been exposed to it before.
“But it’s very enjoyable. There’s an excellent spirit within the group and if you look at the results last weekend like Wexford beating Offaly, there’s not a pile of difference between Division Four and even the bottom of Division Two. We know the lads are improving and that they’ll get even better over time.”
That in its own way is fruitful for the child formerly known as Ephraim Fitzgerald.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
