[SIZE=6]Davy so much more than fire and brimstone[/SIZE]
[SIZE=5]Banner boss is picture of undiluted passion – but he also has most logical mind in the game[/SIZE]
Colm Keys – 19 August 2013
[SIZE=5]On the Monday night after Clare’s [U]Munster[/U][/URL] semi-final defeat to Cork, [URL=‘http://searchtopics.independent.ie/topic/Davy_Stockbrokers’][U]Davy[/U] Fitzgerald called a meeting. The venue said much about the intimacy of Fitzgerald’s leadership of a group that today stands a single footfall from immortality.[/SIZE]
He brought them to his house in Sixmilebridge where, over biscuits and soft drinks, they spent the evening dissecting a game that had left them communally bruised.
Cork had won by eight points and, in the sweeping way of this business, Clare’s precocity was now being written of as a flaw in their make-up.
This despite their spurning of maybe half a dozen goal chances and the loss of one of their primary ball winners in attack to an early concussion. For Fitzgerald, the evening was about a calm reassertion of group values.
They would, he said, keep doing the things they believed in, leaving the outside world to draw whatever conclusions took its fancy.
Not many would have imagined then that the hurling communities of Cork and Clare would be booked in for a [U]Croke Park[/U][/URL] reassembly two and half months later. But, with [URL=‘http://searchtopics.independent.ie/topic/Davy_Stockbrokers’][U]Davy[/U], there has never been an orthodoxy to his dreams.
His personality is an open window. On the line, he is unburdened by self-awareness, endlessly flailing and jolting as if the ground beneath him tingles with a live electric current. The impression given is of a man struggling to contain the energies within, maybe of a grenade with a loose pin.
Caricature follows him like a shadow then. It also hopelessly misreads him.
PASSION
For Davy has, arguably, the most logical mind in hurling. He doesn’t buy into the ‘all on the day’ cliche of big games taking ungovernable paths that defy pre-planning. Analysis is Davy’s passion, thoroughness his bottom line.
Everything is worn so publicly, so animatedly, his game savvy tends to get overlooked. But with Clare harvesting sheath after sheath of golden youngsters right now, it is becoming increasingly clear that the organic development of them – from current joint U-21 bosses, Gerry O’Connor and Donal Moloney, right through to the management team that Fitzgerald has assembled for the seniors – is evolving in perfect harmony.
Clare hurled majestically at times, their tactical coherence too much for a Limerick team that seemed critically diminished by hype and big-game nerves.
For Clare, the experience of two All-Ireland U-21 victories in the last four years has brought clear psychological advantages. Success is ingrained in their thinking and, in young players like [U]Tony Kelly[/U] and Podge Collins particularly, they have spectacular young stags who simply refuse to be contained.
Cleverly, Fitzgerald deployed Kelly at midfield and [U]the move[/U] palpably blew some fuses in Limerick’s game plan.
But to win, a team needs ice as well as fire. And it was Colin Ryan’s nervelessness on frees that most stridently identified the differences in these neighbours.
While Ryan looked like he could have split the posts while doing the Croke Park skywalk, Declan Hannon suffered a wretched meltdown.
The tone of Limerick’s day was set with the spillage of five wides in the opening 10 minutes alone. That would be Clare’s total for the game in its entirety.
Brendan Bugler is, at 28, one of their old soldiers now. He knew the tenor of what we’d seen. “I suppose it’s a cliche, but we left it all out there on the field, we worked hard for this,” said the Whitegate man. “Clare hurling has been on a low for a few years but Davy has come in and what a man – he’s completely turned things around.”
For Fitzgerald himself, there would be no theatrics, no jitter-bugging dance at the conclusion.
He looked physically drained as he reached out towards [U]John Allen[/U][/URL], the two managers engaging with palpable warmth in contrast to their sideline skirmish in the [URL=‘http://searchtopics.independent.ie/topic/National_League’][U]National League[/U] Division 1B final last year.
After Fitzgerald had wheeled straight down the tunnel at the end of Clare’s quarter-final defeat of Galway on July 28, he told his players that he had no interest in pats on the back from strangers just as likely to “crucify” him in other circumstances.
“The only people that interest me are in this room,” he said.
Yesterday, that tightness of the group was written in everything Clare did. He beckoned the substitutes down out of the Hogan Stand to stand alongside management for the national anthem. And when a decision to wave a [U]James Ryan[/U] effort wide was reversed after consultation with the referee (Hawk-Eye being on leave for the day), the heat coming off Davy could have started a gorse fire.
Yet, Clare would never trail in this game. They led from the third minute to the end.
It was then an all-the-way front-running gallop into only their seventh senior All-Ireland final in history and, for a man who led Waterford in '08 to their first final since '63, there is the sense of a CV now, finally, beginning to find appropriate recognition.
Of course, there are plenty who don’t warm to Fitzgerald, even within Clare itself and he is endlessly aware of their scepticism.
“I’m so proud of these young lads,” he told us. "They are an example to everyone playing the game, because they work so hard, they never say die. Have we taken a lot of stick over the last year and a half? We all have, but they kept coming back and it’s so nice when you know that when you ask them to do something, they’ll do it.
"Look, it was a big day for us today, we were written off by a lot of people. Like, I’ve been involved in three losing semi-finals and won the other one as a manager, it is tough and you have to learn lessons.
"Even myself as a manager, you’re learning all the time. The thing I love about these guys is they’re mad for a challenge, which is important. We’d all have been getting stick as management and players during the year, but the one thing I knew is that they’ll stay doing what you ask them to do; that’s a good sign of any team.
“Will I keep 36 guys happy? I’ll wait to see any manager that can keep 36 guys happy, but I can tell you this very categorically – 99pc of those lads, even when we were losing games, were happy. I love these boys to bits.”
He mentioned his “savage” back-room team, listing them all by name and vowing that the great raft of his players that face an All-Ireland U-21 semi-final against Galway next Saturday will “not be asked to come near” his squad in the interim. But something giant and distracting is sure to course each and every one now.
WHIRLWIND
Davy Fitzgerald was such an emblematic figure in the All-Ireland-winning teams of '95 and '97, he will know the whirlwind coming Clare’s way now.
“I know what comes with an All-Ireland,” he smiled. "I could see it over the last week. It took us a while to get going down in Clare as regards getting the flags and the bunting out, but it definitely took off over the last week. And it kind of reminded me of the mid-'90s you know? We’re in tough times.
"Has this given Clare people a lift? It has and I think that’s fantastic.
“But my job with the team is September 8. We have a few PR jobs to do here and there and we will do them. At the same time, there’s only one job (that matters) and that’s preparing the team and they’ve got to remember that. It’s all about 3.30 on September 8 and all of the sideshows don’t matter.”
If there was ever a man born for to surf this wave, you sense Clare have him.
