Combined with this weekend’s opening Allianz League games, student inter-county players are facing into a gruelling period, which Brian Cody has already blasted as “madness”.

While Fanning believes most county managers will mind their younger hurlers, he can’t understand why such pressure is being put on them by the Fitzgibbon format.

“I think it’s crazy what they’ve done,” he said. “Last week and the week before, I can’t understand why there were no Fitzgibbon games played. I don’t understand how they came up with the fixtures schedule. Anybody who talks about burnout is talking out both sides of their mouth on it because you can’t justify it.

“It’s not fair on the players, it’s not fair on the colleges, and it’s not fair on county teams getting ready for the National League when people are expecting them to be able to perform.

“It’s very disappointing that the games are going on in the time period they are going on when there was a free week last week and there’s no hurling last weekend.

“It would have been very easy for every inter-county manager to manage it.

I think there’s frustration across the board. I said it last year when I was involved with the (WIT) Fitzgibbon team. It was a crazy schedule then and they didn’t change it for this year. It has to be reviewed.

While there are only nine of the Waterford panel involved in the Fitzgibbon Cup this year, and the business development operations manager with WIT Novus has a handle on those Déise players studying in the city, it remains a juggling act.

“It’s been very difficult on the Waterford IT lads too because lads are trying to train and be ready on a training programme but we work as best we can. I think every county manager — and I’ve spoken to a couple of them lately as well — is trying to do what’s best for the players and they shouldn’t be in that position.

“I’m lucky enough, I’m working here, the lads are in college as well so we do our best to make it work but it can be difficult.”

Fanning’s frustration about Waterford losing home advantage for this Sunday’s Division 1B game against Offaly is well known. It still rankles — “I don’t think it’s a good step for the GAA” — but he is keen to move on. He gets a feeling from outside the county that Waterford are not fancied this season, even if they were All-Ireland runners-up just 16 months ago.

“That All-Ireland final is only two years ago, the younger lads are older and a couple of lads have come in so I think the squad is in a really good place. I think we’re as competitive as anybody else. We have our self-belief. People might write us off but we can’t do anything about that. We can only look after ourselves, prepare as best we can, put everything into it and whatever happens after that we can live with that.”

He’s keeping his cards close to his chest in relation to tactics.

“Hopefully, we’ll have a hard-working team. I’m not going to go into too much about how we’re going to play. We may use a sweeper at times, we may not. You have to play what’s in front of you. As you saw with Clare last year, they switched back to a sweeper at one stage.

“I think the way the game has gone you have to adapt to certain circumstances during games and you may even change mid-game a lot.

I’m not married to one particular system but I’m looking forward to the lads getting a good grasp of what we want, which we’ve been working hard on through the winter.

With the Ballygunner contingent unavailable due to All-Ireland club duty and Conor Gleeson unavailable through injury, Fanning anticipates the team to face Offaly will be close to those sides that took the field in the Munster League.