Mark Fitzgerald enjoyed a productive Electric Ireland Fitzgibbon Cup campaign with UL. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
By Kevin Egan
In just over two months’ time, Cusack Park in Ennis will be the venue for the first battle of the 2025 Munster Senior Hurling Championship, a potentially thrilling repeat of last year’s All-Ireland senior final between Clare and Cork.
Later that afternoon Limerick will travel to FBD Semple Stadium to take on Tipperary, with Waterford waiting in the wings to join the fray a week later against Clare.
All five county panels were represented among the 19 players that saw action in yesterday’s Fitzgibbon Cup final on the UL side, with centre back Mark Fitzgerald flying the flag for the Déise.
The Passage East man knows what’s coming down the tracks, but he also knew that putting that county rivalry aside – even temporarily – was central to UL winning their third title in four years and making amends for last year’s final defeat to city rivals Mary I.
“It’s massive, the friends you make in college are friends for life,” Fitzgerald says.
“We all have our clubs and a lot of us are playing county, but this is a great group. We had a few league games there before Christmas, we got to have a few nights out to bond the group together and I think it shows. It’s great to have good hurlers but if you don’t have that team spirit, you’ll be beaten by another team that does.
“In two or three months’ time we’ll be on opposite teams tearing lumps out of each other, but we all know how it works, today is a great day, a brilliant day, and we’re all able to put the county stuff aside because we all wanted to do this together.”
It was definitely a day for collective effort. UL scores from Gearóid O’Connor, Adam English and Fitzgerald himself were among the highlights that showed the quality that was on the field in Bekan, but the contest was heavily punctuated with rucks and physical battles too, which the Waterford county star cited as a factor in why UL struggled to pull away from a resilient DCU side.
“The winter hurling is all about rucks and winning your own dirty ball,” he adds. “You just have to get stuck into them, you know it’s going to be part of the game when pitches are like this.
“We said at half-time that there were going to be spells in the game where we’d have to dig in and grind out the win. The lads that came off the bench played a huge part, we’ve guys there that would get into any team”.
Four points off the bench certainly made a difference in a five-point win, as did the physical power that Seán Rynne, Seán O’Hanlon, Diarmuid Hanniffy and Cathal O’Neill, in particular, made, after coming into the fray.
The memory of last year’s two-point loss in Abbeydorney in the same fixture was also mentioned, however.
“It’s always going to be at the back of your mind, last year was a hard one for the lads of us that were there,” he says. “But we’ve a few unreal second years there that didn’t experience that, so they brought that new lease of life and a different energy to the group. But absolutely, the lads that were there last year, we knew we had to right the wrong.”
