The first thing Darragh Egan did when he took over the Wexford hurlers last September was tell them he didn’t have much to do. He had seen them during the Davy Fitz years, he had coached against them. He had tried to find a hole in them and he hadn’t always been successful. It was part of the reason he liked the sound of the gig.
Egan was impressed by the standards Wexford had set for themselves. He liked that they were in tune with each other, that they had a core identity that was a world removed from where Wexford hurling had been when they arrived on the scene. They weren’t going to need to be broken down and built back up. It was important that they realised that.
“You see it with teams in every sport,” says Conor McDonald. “Everything comes to an end at some stage. Everything runs its course. We were a team that had success in 2019 and then just fell at a couple of hurdles over the next couple of years
“Darragh saw that in us when he came in. It was a very smooth transition because he just said to us that really all we needed was a few tweaks here and there. He wasn’t coming in saying that everything that went before was wrong. It was more so just about freshening up, getting a fresh voice.
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“It wasn’t a case of throwing everything in the bin or telling us we had been failing. It was probably the complete opposite really. He had his homework done, he knew what our strengths were. He told us it was just about adding extra layers to it. That’s the language he uses – to marry the style we know works, that is tried and tested, and to add a few things that mean we’re a bit less predictable.”
Nine months on, they’re in the last six of the All-Ireland. They’re nobody’s idea of the eventual champions but they’re still in there pitching. Between league and championship, they’ve played 12 times in 2022 and only been beaten twice. Every other county has lost at least three games in that time.
You can say what you like about the league – every game we were in, both teams were trying to win
They were one of the teams of the league right up until the point where Waterford reminded them that it was a post with only one vacancy. They beat Cork and Limerick at home, Clare and Galway away. Only the league, fair enough. But they weren’t the favourites for any of those matches and yet they won them all. In an established set-up, league wins can be empty calories. For a team with a new manager, this was pure protein.
Egan used 30 players during the spring campaign, the third highest of any Division One county – one fewer than Cork and five fewer than Galway. If there was a notable departure from the Davy Fitz years, this was it. Fitzgerald generally hit the 24-26 range when it came to players used during the league, reasoning that he was never likely to stray too far from that area come summertime.
But Egan handed out a raft of debuts and assured a heap of youngsters that they had his trust. McDonald points to the likes of Oisín Pepper, Oisín Foley, Charlie McGuckin, Richie Lawlor, Kyle Scallan and Cian Molloy as kids who have come through under the new regime and who found their sea legs during the league.
“It’s a big thing for them to be starting out their Wexford careers in a team that is winning games,” McDonald says. “You can say what you like about the league – every game we were in, both teams were trying to win. It’s extremely important for Wexford that young players are in that situation and they get to know what winning feels like.”
If we didn’t go out together after the league campaign, win, lose or draw, you could very easily slip into the trap of not enjoying it.
That it ended with a whipping from Waterford in the league semi-final could have curdled everything but they made sure not to let it. Three weeks out from their Leinster Championship opener, Egan would have been well within his rights to declare martial law and confine everyone to barracks to think hard about what they’d done. He did the opposite. Wexford finished out the league together. Out, together.
“The relationship between GAA players and alcohol is just absurd,” says McDonald, a fitness instructor in real life. “Intercounty GAA and a social life don’t seem to marry up at all. I think it’s changing. I think it takes a group of players or an era of players to change attitudes and I think it has started to change a good bit. The idea that you have to completely cut out that side of your life is fading out really.
“If we didn’t go out together after the league campaign, win, lose or draw, you could very easily slip into the trap of not enjoying it. That’s something that Darragh has really instilled into the group – to make sure that we’re enjoying training, we’re enjoying the process, we’re enjoying the games and we’re enjoying each other. People paint the picture of you going for a couple of pints as being on a bender. As long as you’re not doing the dog on it, there’s no problem.”
There’s balance in everything. Wexford have had Gordon D’Arcy and Billy Walsh on board throughout the year as resources for the players to plug into every now and then. Both of them would have given anything to be Wexford hurlers growing up but found they had to settle for being world-class proponents of other pursuits instead.
“They’ve been very good with us,” McDonald says. “They’ve been in and out, they’ve had some meetings with us and given us lots of help around how to think in certain situations. A lot of it has been based around mindset and we have found a lot of it has been replicated within games.
“If you’re in a good position, how do you keep that going for as long as possible? If the other team has a purple patch, how do you react to that? Something like that is huge because there have been long stretches of my career where all the planning around games is about what we’re going to do, what our goals are, what targets we’re looking to hit.
“But what you often neglect is the fact that the other team is setting out to do the same to you, so what are you going to do when it clicks for them? Your game plan isn’t going to go smoothly for 70 minutes so you have to have strategies for when the opposition gets their purple patch.
“Billy is very good about injecting that bit of steel. He’s a very proud Wexford man and he’s very strong on making us think about what it means to be from Wexford. I don’t think we were ever found wanting on that but it’s good to have it reinforced by a guy who’s not often in the country and who can give the perspective of representing the country and representing home.”
All of it counts, all of it helps. Their progress through the championship hasn’t always been simple but they’ve clawed for every inch. They were outplayed the first day by Galway but chased them down the home straight before catching them on the line. They nearly repeated the trick against Dublin but came up just shy.
It left them with an all-or-nothing trip to Nowlan Park, a place they had never beaten Kilkenny in a championship match in six previous attempts. What would have been a thoroughly forbidding notion when McDonald started his intercounty career in 2013 was completely energising to them now. They went and won by four.
Last week they dealt with Kerry and now here they are. Nobody’s soft touch. More than that, a team with a workable route to an All-Ireland final. They need to beat Clare and Kilkenny to get there. Nobody’s saying it’s a slam dunk but they’d have taken your arm off for it when Egan sat them down last September.
“We’ve had learnings the whole way through the championship,” McDonald says. “Wins, draws, defeats, we’ve had it all. The fact that we’re still there is probably a testament to the group. We all kept plugging away at this. Nobody downed tools. No one had anything in their heads other than what was right for the fella beside him. The group is so tight at the moment that it’s a pleasure to be around them.”
