There are different ways of measuring inter-county success or failure, writes An Fear Rua...

The obvious one is the number of All Ireland, League and provincial titles won. In some counties, the measure is to enquire how many years it is since they last won a senior All Ireland or even a provincial title. In all too many cases – whether it’s in football or hurling – the gap back to the last significant title is more than fifty years. Yet, none should lose hope. After all, it took Clare eighty one years to bridge their All Ireland gap.

In the case of Waterford hurling the wait for another title is exactly fifty years long this year. However, there is another measure that can be used that puts a different perspective on the current prospects for Déise hurling, despite last Sunday’s defeat by the All Ireland champions, Kilkenny – now, apparently, comfortably in sight of a four-in-a-row of titles.

Until the present generation of senior hurlers emerged in 1998/99, Waterford hurling – like many counties regarded as ‘weak’ in their preferred code – broadly speaking went in cycles of decades. In other words, an All Ireland title – or at least an appearance in a final – every ten years. It’s almost as if it took the ten years in between titles to muster another credible team of contenders.

In the modern, realistic era of intercounty hurling – which could be said to have begun a few years after the ending of the Civil War – Waterford won their first All Ireland title, albeit at Junior level, in 1928. Ten years later, they contested the senior final against Dublin. A further ten years, and 1948 saw them achieve their first senior title, enhanced in that same year by a minor title as well. A decade later – not exactly in ’58 – but in 1957 and 1959, the county was again contesting senior All Ireland finals. Against the previous trend, largely because they started out so young in 1957, that exceptional team were still around to unsuccessfully contest the 1963 final, where they had been firm favourites to beat Kilkenny.

After that, there is a gap of effectively forty years before the county emerged again as a respected force in the intercounty arena. Along the way, there were humiliating defeats by Cork in Munster finals in the early Eighties and the nadir was reached in 1993, when Kerry defeated Waterford in the Munster senior hurling championship.

It’s idle to speculate now on why and how the ‘ten year’ cycle was broken. One reason may be that the demise of the great team of Grimes, Power and Morrissey coincided with the rise to prominence of a hugely successful Waterford soccer team that dominated League of Ireland football from 1966 to 1972, winning six consecutive league titles. Maybe their success caused city youngsters of that era to switch their allegiance from hurling to soccer? The Ban on Playing Foreign Games was still in force; indeed, it was more vigorously policed in the Waterford of Padraig Ó Fainín than almost anywhere else, making it difficult to combine playing or following soccer with Gaelic games. Economically, the late Sixties weren’t the best of times for Waterford as many longstanding industries were forced to the wall by the cold winds of free trade. AFR has always believed that a modicum of economic stability in a county is a prerequisite to hurling success.

Whatever the reasons for it, that long term decline was finally punctuated in 1998 by a senior hurling team backboned by an All Ireland Under 21 winning team of six years previously and a minor team that reached the All Ireland final in the same year. In the ten years or so since then, they did not lay their fingers on the holy grail of the Liam McCarthy Cup and the county will always be counted as less than successful until that happens. However, along that ten-year road, there have been Munster titles, a League title, an All Ireland final appearance and seven All Ireland semi finals. That list has been augmented by Munster club championships, an appearance in a club final and – more significantly – by two Harty and two Croke Cup titles for De La Salle College. The importance of those Colleges successes should not be underestimated. Mount Sion’s victory in the Harty Cup in 1953 was an important marker on the road from ’48 to ’57-’59.

The panel of players who took part in last Sunday’s semi final defeat may not themselves win an All Ireland title, although that should not be entirely ruled out. But, by putting it up to Kilkenny in the way that they did, they have built a platform for a Waterford team to do so in the foreseeable future – a lot sooner than the fifty years the county has waited until now.

The real significance of Sunday’s outcome is that it was not just a Waterford side flashing in the pan, as it were, and then disappearing for another ten years. Rather, it was a team bracketing a decade of considerable achievement with a fine performance and still a force to be reckoned with. The likes of Browne, McGrath and Kelly are passing on a brightly burning torch to a new generation of Waterford hurlers who, unlike their forebears, are more accustomed to success than failure. That is this team’s achievement and legacy.

It is often easier said than done to translate Colleges, minor and Under 21 success into a senior All Ireland title but without such success the gap to your last title won begins to stretch from ten to twenty to fifty years, as it has done in Waterford’s case.

Against that optimistic background, a niggling doubt remains. It is this. Is Davy Fitzgerald the man who can mould these resources into an All Ireland winning combination? So far, his tenure in Waterford has been marked by a disaster of Titanic proportions and a recovery worthy of Lazarus. But is that a suitable foundation for sustained success?

Fitzgerald’s tetchy, paranoid public persona – seeing slights and conspiracies against him everywhere – seems like a distorted echo of what he saw role modelled by Loughnane in the Clare laager of 1995-98. You'd have to wonder just how that approach plays in the dressing room. In addition, his tenure at Waterford has not been particularly marked by either selectorial or tactical nous, allied to a worrying tendency to delay making team changes during big games (notwitstanding the late introduction of Dan Shanahan in the quarter final against Galway).

It maybe that in a county that wandered for eighty one years in the hurling wilderness his is a mindset and approach that was needed to punch through to an All Ireland victory. But does that mean it's the correct approach for Waterford now? Will it work in a county that often takes a less choleric approach to its sporting participation? In a county that is now rich in under age and senior talent – and experience – perhaps a more nuanced, optimistic approach might pay a better dividend in the long run?


Davy Fitzgerald... is he the Messiah to lead the Déise into the Promised Land?