No Irish childhood is complete without a year under the tutelage of a greenhorn múinteoir with romantic notions of inculcating his/her students with a love of many more things than are contained in the fourth class syllabus.
You know the type: if the sun was shining you could convince them it would be better to play football in the yard, while lessons could be delayed indefinitely by the mere mention of the 1916 Rising or, more importantly, whether Ryan Giggs, Lee Sharpe or Andrei Kanchelskis was United’s greatest attacking threat.
I studied (looked out the window) under just such a character in my primary school days. He was a giant, energetic man from Séan O Riada country down near the Kerry border who still had his training college lustre and a desire to shape our pliable young minds.
Amongst his hair brain plans included getting us to make a Styrofoam model of our prefabricated schoolhouse. In theory, the plan was sound. We sketched the buildings and drafted detailed drawings. To carve the Styrofoam, he had come up with an ingenious plan of heating giant needles stuck in wine corks like cocktail sticks. The corks served as handles and the red-hot needles carved through the Styrofoam like Ryan Giggs through the Oldham Athletic defence.
There was a catch. A red hot needle carved through anything. I know because we tried. Plastic chairs, copy books, lunch boxes and even the slightly rotund lad’s pencil case at the front of the class. The idea was abandoned when, attracted by the commotion, the Priomhoide walked into the class and caught one of the less focused lads carving his initials in his neighbour’s Liverpool lunch box. Suffice to say, the pioneering teacher was warned to run every future idea past his superiors.
I can only imagine the Waterford County Board must feel that same trepidation every time they let their rookie manager, Davy Fitzgerald, loose on the national media. However, bar putting a gagging order on the Clare native, there is nothing they can really do to stop him when he has the bit between his teeth.
It’s hard to know what Fitzgerald thought his latest rant – a cuss-filled tirade aimed at the Munster Council after Sunday’s draw with Limerick – would achieve. It will be argued that Fitzgerald was merely taking the pressure off his players after a truly woeful performance that saw the Déise throw away a six-point half-time lead. Others will say that he simply cannot help himself and when pushed by the media, he will deliver his scattergun, stream of consciousness barbs as easily as a slot machine dispenses quarters.
Davy’s musings were splashed – replete with more stars than a frosty night – on the back pages of Monday’s papers, and the audio was played with the expletives bleeped out over the national airwaves on Monday night’s Off the Ball on Newstalk. As bad as the quotes in the press were, the radio clips were worse.
He had a bee in his bonnet over the Munster Council’s officiating in Thurles on Sunday and made some vague inferences that he may have been verbally abused – by whom, however, he did not make clear. He reserved the bulk of his ire for an official who refused his son entry to the pitch and then went on a self-righteous rant about preserving the values of the GAA and how so many people gave up so much of their free time so kids could enjoy our games.
As Daithi Reagan, the former All-Ireland medal winner with Offaly, rightly pointed out, his son should have been in the stand where kids belong at adult inter-county games. Some will argue that, just like the bibbed maor collecting ticket money in a biscuit tin at the gates, allowing kids on the sidelines is part of the unique charm and twee allure of the GAA. Those days, for better or worse, are well and truly over.
I still have sepia-tinted memories of my father bundling us kids into the car on Sunday’s to the various GAA pitches around Cork. After a match, the men, with kids in tow, would decamp to the club bar where they would dote on treacly pints of Guinness and hordes of kids would be banished to the back of the hall with enough crisps and lemonade to keep them out of harm’s way. Just like kids don’t belong in the adult world of pubs, they have no place roaming the sideline in Thurles, where Championship hurling can do strange things to men.
His point about heavy-handed officiating is perhaps not without merit; however, as with all these things, there are channels and means of making official complaints without using the media as a go between. In choosing to use expletives and foul language he emasculated any valid point he may have been attempting to make. His point about “doing it for the kids” was made to look rather foolish by subjecting any minor within earshot of a radio to a volley from his forked tongue.
It was interesting to note the reaction of Paul Flynn, the former Waterford forward, to the radio clip, which he heard while in the Off the Ball studio in Cork. Flynn’s guard was down in the laid back atmosphere and he gave a glimpse of what he really thought of Waterford’s performance and the manager – for whom he played, albeit briefly – last year. Flynn, a talisman under Justin McCarthy, was a peripheral figure under Fitzgerald, playing just 17 minutes of Championship hurling last year.
Flynn is not the first former player to criticise Fitzgerald: Dave Bennett was particularly pointed in his rejection of the aggressive tactics employed in the 2008 All-Ireland final in an interview he did with the Sunday Times last year. After the McCarthy years, where three Munster titles were won with an emphasis mastering the subtler side of the game, some of the older players clearly baulked at the new man’s tendency to focus on the increasing fitness levels and exposing them to hurling’s darker arts.
Flynn and Bennett both retired. Fitzgerald must have disciples amongst his current crew because none will ever utter a word of dissent such is the esteem in which he is held. The common perception is that Fitzgerald’s new broom had swept Waterford to the All-Ireland final last year after things had gone stale at the end of McCarthy’s tenure. In hindsight, that is probably a facile argument.
A Certain kind of player will always respond to the table-thumping, emotive managerial style Fitzgerald adopts; indeed, it was probably manna from heaven to some after the somewhat sedate, measured demeanour of the Corkman. I would guess that McCarthy was the victim of the players’ collective hubris. Waterford were – and still are – an aging team desperately looking to crown a glorious era with an All-Ireland title. It must have been easy to lay the blame at the feet of the man who plotted their course so skilfully when they got lost at the start of last season.
Fitzgerald drew a late spurt from a spluttering engine last year and from the evidence of last Sunday’s draw with Limerick, it looks like McCarthy may have been inadvertently dealt a sweet hand from what he thought was a bum deal.
Fitzgerald is lionised as the epitome of the archetypal hurling man – the passionate, unpretentious and slightly uncouth son of the ash. It is a misnomer. Humility, stoicism and class are the attributes I would associate more with the game. Maybe he should look to his predecessor, McCarthy, for a little guidance on the behaviour more befitting an inter-county hurling manager.