“We should have killed the play”
Waterford manager Davy Fitzgerald arrives at Walsh Park in determined mood.
Seanie Kenneally’s injury-time goal felt like a dagger to the heart for Davy Fitzgerald.
“It’s killing me,” he admitted during his post-match interview on Saturday evening. “We should have been smarter. That play shouldn’t have been allowed to develop when you’re four points up with two minutes to go. We should have killed the play and ye can take whatever ye want from that. We should have killed the play out on the sideline and maybe we’ll learn a lesson from that.”
Davy couldn’t hide his disappointment with a share of the spoils. “We should have won that game. We’re four points up with time up. After the goal, I knew it was going to be a draw. Even if they fell over their laces they were going to get a free! That’s ok. I don’t blame them or the ref, we should have finished that game. I’m extremely proud of the lads. They fought very hard, worked very hard. We went down in the second half and we came back and we battled. This is a different bunch of guys, they are resilient. They’re deflated, they’re disappointed because they know we should have won. But that’s the way it goes.” Tipp’s fiery performance didn’t surprise him. “Everybody knew what was coming today. If you look at the game last week, Nickie Quaid made an unbelievable save, Sean Finn made an interception and a ball came off the post. I don’t think the result last week was as bad. Their work-rate today was off the charts.”
He confirmed that Conor Prunty came off with a quad injury. “To lose your full back, who I rate as one of the best full backs in the game, that was tough. That was a big blow to us. They’re gutted; the lads feel that it was one that got away from us. The neutrals will be happy, it was ebbing and flowing, but we have to be a small bit tighter. If we are that loose against Clare, we’ll be punished.” Where does this result leave Waterford ahead of trips to Clare and Limerick? “If we get another win we’ll be in a Munster Final. We’ll be close enough to it, not far away from it. Could we qualify with three points? We could. Is there a chance we mightn’t if we don’t win another game? There is. There’s a lot of permutations, we’ll just take the Clare game. It’s funny. I was listening to Liam Sheedy on Sunday Sport and they were talking about Clare and Limerick qualifying. He was saying, ‘sure it’s a given. Waterford will go to Clare and Clare will definitely win that one’. I was saying, sure we might as well not turn up at all! But we will turn up. The best thing this year compared to last year is, no matter what, we’re in the last game with something to fight for. We haven’t been beaten in the Munster championship in our last three games so we’re making strides anyway.”
Fitzgerald downplayed the half-time incident when he ran across the field as Liam Cahill had words with referee James Owens. “I was just going over to see Liam was ok! I wanted to make sure he was good. That was it.”
In front of the Tipp dressing room, Cahill was proud of how his team bounced back. “I celebrated as if it was a win, but really what I was celebrating was the fight in my team. I wasn’t celebrating the one point. I wasn’t celebrating the so-called narrative of getting out of jail. I was celebrating the fight in us, in our players, in Tipperary. That is what I was celebrating today.” He referenced his post-match interview against Limerick. “Your emotions go bananas when things go wrong on the big stage in a Tipperary jersey. We as a group never intend to not fight or die in our boots on the field. We never intend to do that. So, we took massive ownership of what happened last weekend. We took massive ownership of it because we had to. We own that for the rest of our lives. I own, maybe, some of my comments in the aftermath. I own that and it weighed heavy. We just draw a line under that now and go forward with this performance and still try and make sure that we qualify out of this province of death in Munster.” Some of the local criticism was over the top in his view. “We tend to love a good failure in Tipp. That is what disappoints me the most. Some of the analysis was very warranted, absolutely it was warranted, but some of it wasn’t.”
