Davy Fitzgerald must have gotten tactical heatstroke over on the Waterford warm weather training camp as Déise defeated Cork 2-25 to 1-25, securing their first win in the Munster round-robin against an opponent that isn’t named Tipperary.
The two-time All-Ireland-winning goalkeeper was quick to be witty with GAAGO as he brought up the speculated trouble in the camp ahead of the championship.
“There’s a lot of trouble in our camp, isn’t there?" he said.
“If you really look at the league, we had a lot of injuries,” Fitzgerald told a bunch of reporters in the relative calm away from the masses.
“The team we had today, we were missing maybe six or seven every day. We were within a score – and I kept telling ye that we weren’t too far away.
“To go out when we were missing as many as we were and be right there, I knew we weren’t far away. The thing we had to do is just not listen to what was being said outside. As I told [a local reporter] earlier on in the year, when you heard rumours about certain players not playing, I said don’t always believe what you hear.”
“Am I going to tell you what I said during the week? Not a fucking hope.”
“Do I know we can still improve? I do. I’m really proud of the effort. You can see the tackles that went in today. That’s what you want. Today is today. I’m not stupid. We’re not there. We have more to do. I know that. I know we’re a long way off qualifying yet. We’ll enjoy this 24 hours and go again, yeah?”
De Búrca back To brilliant best for Waterford
Fitzgerald was also quick to praise the returning Tadgh De Búrca, who played his first game in over a year since sustaining an Achilles injury against Limerick in the opening round of last year's championship
“He didn’t do bad for a lad that had no game time in a year. Tadhg is a special guy. To do what he did today, to come back from [his Achilles injury] last year, that takes a lot of character and it takes resilience.
“You can see he is a very smart player as well. He hasn’t played a full game. Even a training game, the most he had played was 55-60 minutes. For him to last outside there today, it was his mental resilience got him through that.”
