Clare captain Patrick O Connor.
By Cian O'Connell
“With Davy, anything is possible," Clare captain Patrick O'Connor replies when asked whether if somebody had suggested 12 months ago that Davy Fitzgerald would be busy preparing a team for a provincial decider.
It isn't just Clare, who are getting ready for a July 9 assignment with Cork in Munster, but Wexford will bring a pumped up team to Croke Park on Sunday for the Leinster showpiece against Galway, and O'Connor has been impressed.
"If you were taking this exact date last year, you’d be thinking what is going to lie ahead and the winter was going to be an interesting winter.
"But it turned out to be, for both parties, a kind of a natural ending to the very successful time he had here and he’s expressed as much, that it was his call to go and he’s happy he did go.
"Wexford are reaping the benefits now because from what I can see down there, there’s a really rejuvenated manager, his energy is up and he looks well, and he obviously has a Wexford team responding to all of the enthusiasm he brings to it. We’re delighted to see that here."
O'Connor and Fitzgerald always enjoyed a healthy relationship with the former Clare boss. Was it difficult considering the faith Fitzgerald had placed in O'Connor?
“Well, yeah, and it’s the same professionally, the relationship you have with your manager is never going to be pally-pally, it can’t be," O'Connor says.
"And it’s based solely on your player-manager relationship. He played me any time I was fit so from that point of view, I had a very good relationship with Davy.
Wexford manager Davy Fitzgerald.
"Like any other player/manager, we mightn’t necessarily have talked five times a week or anything like that but no player/manager is like that, it can’t be like that.
"Within the group, we knew that it was clean and it was good, what we were doing, and it was done the right way, between player and manager.
"But the stick that he took from outside, nobody wanted to see that happening to him because he’s an immensely passionate Clare man, first of all, and a hurling man second.
"The stick he took outside, we didn’t like watching that or hearing that.
Ultimately, has it been a win-win situation for Clare and Wexford since last summer? “Looking at it like that, it does look like a win-win but if circumstances were different, it wouldn’t have changed anything," O'Connor states.
"It finished well between both players and management. He was happy to go and it was a natural ending, really. We all watched the Wexford team and chatting to the lads, we’d be delighted to see them as long as it remains in Leinster, if it goes outside that it might be a bit different.
"But we’re delighted to see him having success because we know how much he cares and how much he puts into it.
"It’s like anything – you put so much into something and you want to see results and satisfaction coming out of it. He’s certainly getting that in abundance so far.”
