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Davy Fitzgerald records his respect for Limerick’s pitches and what has been accomplished. But membership in the growing infatuation society of the Treaty, which implies the submission that they will dominate the game as Kilkenny did for a decade still has to pay its debts for that.
Projections that they have the structures and resources to govern pitches like Dublin governs football are disproportionate, he thinks. And it reminds them that even though the perception is that they were ‘caught’ last year, they were still beaten.
“I don’t think the gap is huge and I think various teams will try to figure out some different bits and pieces. I think the gap is possible, I think it can be made up,” he predicted.
“In another two or three years we will be able to answer that question; whether they will have a dynasty or not. My opinion is that I don’t think it’s the same as Dublin in football competitions. Will Limerick Win another All-Ireland? They could win one. or two, I just don’t see them doing five or six in a row.
“When a team is winning, a lot of different things are going to come up about what they’ve done here, there and everywhere. They have a lot of great structures in Limerick, but there are a lot of counties that have great structures as well. One or two outcomes change everything. That thought. Like, I can remember the wonder of whether Kilkenny would ever come off the top in hurling. 2007, 2008, 2009 – people think there is no hope of this.
Unbeatable
“Limerick looks pretty unbeatable right now, but I’m sure Brian Cody, Liam Sheedy, Shane O’Neill, myself, Kieran Kingston, Liam Cahill, we’re not going to sit around and say, ‘That’s right, good luck. Guys, you may have the next three or four years to yourselves. ” We’ll be rattling heads to see, “okay, they’re there, what can we do?”
“And let me tell you this clearly: you have to admire what Limerick has done and play fair with them. They get along, everything they do is really good and professional and fair play, amazing team. But it’s up to us. So We can all talk about Limerick, but I think we have to go back and focus on our own counties and do the best we can. “
Can Wexford be in that conversation? Fitzgerald has just come off the back of the poorest of his four seasons in charge, certainly in championship terms, as they never came close to standards in any of the championship losses to Galway and Clare they have been setting for themselves. themselves.
In the immediate aftermath of the loss to Clare, Fitzgerald said the players made it clear to him that they wanted him in charge in 2021. And within days he had committed to a fifth year at the helm. He will also be involved with his Sixmilebridge club next year, an arrangement that he believes will be facilitated by the introduction of a split season.
“I would be very proud of the season,” he said. “I’m not happy with the Wexford part and how we went, but overall, I think GAA has shown what it’s all about. People went out, went to train, worked very hard. Believe me, being involved, it was a very different, a very different feeling.
“Going to empty stadiums, being so mindful of trying to maintain your own space, doing the right things, there were so many different things this year that made it more difficult. But I’m proud that I put in the effort, proud of the way GAA He took it.
“I know that at the club (in general) we had some celebratory incidents afterwards. I’d like to think we learned a lesson from that. While all the games and all the officials were excellent at getting things done, there could have been some mistakes made. But if you look at the way even the Irish champions behaved, I think it’s very commendable. Fair play for them. “
He feels the break worked against Wexford as results, on the field and in terms of the fitness measures they are guided by. And on that front he admits that he could have wrong his projections about how the season would go.
“I thought there would be GAA from day one and I said, ‘Okay, they’ll put the counties first,’ because I said it’s easier to manage, it’s easier to control, you don’t have 20 or 30 or 40 clubs in a county.
“I’m not making excuses, but I think we were moving very well in March and April and I think we would have been serious, probably in July. If I showed them our fitness results in June, they wouldn’t believe it; if I showed them. in October, there was a big difference. “
From a broader perspective, in response to a proposal from the GAA rules of the game committee, Fitzgerald supports defending a penalty when a foul denies him a clear scoring opportunity, but stops before a sin-bin, a Yellow card mode, in Throwing as a supplementary punishment.
“If it’s a clear scoring opportunity, then I think you’re entitled to a penalty. That’s to be honest because someone has knocked someone down, to make sure they don’t have that chance. I’d probably see something like that having a lot of merit.
“To be fair, in soccer you can be almost 20 or 30 yards from goal, but you’re the last man to back up and you take down a friend. It almost looks like, ‘He has to go,’ opportunity to score goals.
“We have to be very careful with that, it has to be a clear opportunity to score. If it is, I think it will eliminate those kinds of fouls from the game. I think it will eliminate them.”
But in the latest move by the GAA ground rules committee to introduce a sin-bin, roundly rejected in Congress last year, Fitzgerald is far less sympathetic.
“I don’t want my physical appearance to be taken away. Cynics, 110 percent. But I don’t know if I’d be a fan of putting someone in the sin bucket for 10 minutes in a yellow unless it was bordering on a red, so I could see it “.
Davy Fitzgerald spoke at the launch of Londis sponsorship of Ireland’s Fittest Family, which returns to our screens on Sunday at 6.30pm.
Irish independent
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