ANTHONY DALY has backed Davy Fitzgerald to use his experience as Waterford manager to help make Clare Munster champions again.

Fitzgerald will be ratified as the county’s senior hurling manager at the next county board meeting on October 11th, having been the only nominee to fill the vacancy left by Ger O’Loughlin.

Daly was Clare manager himself before taking over the reins so successfully with Dublin. Fitzgerald was a team-mate – as was O’Loughlin – when he captained the county to two All-Ireland successes in 1995 and 1997.

He believes a better candidate could not have been chosen to carry on O’Loughlin’s good work in freshening up an aging Clare panel. “He was the obvious candidate once he said he was interested,” said Daly last evening. “He has worked with Waterford for four years, won a Munster championship, been in four All-Ireland semi-finals, an All-Ireland final, he has two Fitzgibbons won. He can’t win much more, to be fair to him.

“He would be savage well organised, has savage passion and he’d know the players well having worked at colleges level the last few years. The experience he brings from Waterford is a huge thing, I think, because it’s a different level of management. You have to have a bit of know-how about what makes fellas tick. Dealing with fellas for a few years at that level, he’ll have picked up a bit.

“All I know is at the end of my three years at Clare, I’d like to think I was a lot better than I was at the start of it. You learn about man-management and I’d say he’s learned loads in Waterford.”

Many of the victorious All-Ireland under-21 team of 2009 have been blooded at senior level by O’Loughlin, while Fitzgerald may well look to this year’s minor squad for some talent as well.

Given the calibre of player available, expectation is increasing amongst Clare supporters that a first Munster senior title since 1998 is on the horizon.

“That would be the belief, talking to people, with two good minor teams, could’ve won this year’s All-Ireland minor, and then the under-21s are moving on now.

“But the first thing he’ll have to do is get his backroom team sorted and get the best possible people.

“There’s a lot of talk about Louis Mulqueen, Brian Lohan and Mike Deegan, who’d be the Cratloe manager. That would sound like a good combination but I don’t know if these people have even been approached.”

Daly was keen to praise O’Loughlin for his efforts as Clare boss in the past two seasons and cautioned that success at under-21 level was no guarantee of glory at the highest grade. “The results didn’t go his way and they didn’t come out of Division Two but I think Sparrow has done an awful good service to Clare. He didn’t have 26-plus hardly to pick from.

“He was very unlucky with losing Brian O’Connell to Australia, and Gerry O’Grady had to give it up. He was chucked in with a bunch of young lads, really, and obviously it’s a huge step up from under-21 to senior intercounty as everyone has found out.

“You could see it with Dublin this year. But then go back to 2007 when Galway gave them a fairly substantial beating in the Under-21 All-Ireland final, Dublin have more off that team now than Galway. That’s about bringing fellas through and the character of the guys in question.”