Wexford’s Paudie Foley insists high expectation for 2019 is no load

When Damien Fitzhenry spoke last May about it being a silverware or bust season for Wexford, some supporters felt the legendary goalkeeper was piling unnecessary pressure on the county’s hurlers.

Wexford’s Paudie Foley insists high expectation for 2019 is no load

When Damien Fitzhenry spoke last May about it being a silverware or bust season for Wexford, some supporters felt the legendary goalkeeper was piling unnecessary pressure on the county’s hurlers.

Others may even have felt that demanding more from Davy Fitzgerald after what he’d already delivered in a short space of time with the county was, frankly, ungrateful.

Yet, on the eve of year three under the Clare man, it’s the players themselves that are beating the drum and admitting they simply must win something significant in 2019.

Just last month, Wexford forward Conor McDonald said: “Personally, if I’m not winning silverware, I’m failing.”

Even a National League title probably wouldn’t suffice in 2019 if Wexford were to come up short again come summer, leaving them with only a Leinster or All-Ireland title to sate their ambitions.

“One hundred per cent,” said Paudie Foley, when asked if he agreed with McDonald. “We’re two years into a process with Davy and the only reason we wanted him back, and that he wanted to come back, is to win something. We’ve been there or thereabouts with the big teams, we’ve competed well in the league and in the championship. We want silverware now, whether it’s a Leinster title or an All-Ireland title, we’ll be going for it. We’ll take it one game at a time, try to win each game and see where it takes us, definitely, but we know we can compete with the big teams.”

Those who doubt Wexford’s ability to break through and win an All-Ireland, as Clare, Galway and Limerick, have all done in the last five years, will point to this year’s championship exit.

They gave arguably their worst performance of the season in the All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Clare at Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

“A big disappointment,” agreed Foley. “We just didn’t show up that day. I think they probably studied us better than we had them and it kind of showed in different parts of the game where they had their homework done on how we were going to play. It’s something we will learn from and bring forward to 2019.”

Fitzgerald has stated on a number of occasions since the Clare defeat that the increased amount of ultra competitive games this year took its toll on Wexford. He compared their previous schedule of “on average, two big Division 1B games in a year, maybe an All-Ireland quarter-final and two or three Championship games” to this year’s “15 top-class games, and we won nine of them”. Foley, who missed the 2017 season due to a travel break, started all 13 of this year’s league and championship games and also featured in the Walsh Cup games against Dublin and Kilkenny.

“It is double the workload and double the competitive games, so it’s something that was our first year to experience,” said Foley of this year’s return to Division 1A and their six subsequent championship games. “This year, it will be the same again. We’ll know more about that and how to juggle the workload and the intensity of everything, definitely.”

Foley was part of the group of Wexford players that travelled to Fitzgerald’s home in Sixmilebridge after their championship exit to appeal to him to remain in charge. According to Fitzgerald, “after about five minutes, I was sold”.

Foley doesn’t agree with the suggestion that, like ousting a manager, appealing to a manager to stay on isn’t something players should get involved in.

“I think we wanted to do it,” responded Foley. “There was no pressure on us from anywhere. It was the players’ decision. We wanted him back as our manager; it was not that the county board wanted him or anything. We felt that what he had done for us in the previous two years, we felt like we wanted to go back and get him again, because he’s a great manager.

“We felt that he travels so much from Clare to Wexford that we’d go down and it was more just a chat with him. He’s such an easy man to talk to and, being a player himself, he really gets the struggles of playing and everything. It was just a nice informal chat.”

The GAA and the Ombudsman for Children’s Office have launched a collaborative Rights Awareness Resource. The collaboration was undertaken to mark the 25th anniversary celebrations of the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child and to raise awareness and understanding of children’s rights through Gaelic games.

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