Be careful what you wish for. Last season, Wexford celebrated their ascent to the top division for 2025 with the league due to restructure along hierarchical lines for the first time in five years.
By the time the season started, it was clear manager Keith Rossiter would be steering an uphill course. Firstly, there were retirements. Matt O’Hanlon, Liam Óg McGovern and Diarmuid O’Keeffe were established players with good careers behind them.
There was, equally, no surprise about any of them but it represented a loss of leadership capital. O’Hanlon was the longest-serving player on the panel, an All Star nomination and had co-captained the Leinster winning team of 2019 with Lee Chin.
O’Keeffe was an All Star from the same year. McGovern had toughed out a plague of injuries to keep hurling and amongst his significant achievements was providing a sharp edge to the fiery performance against Kilkenny in 2023 when his 2-1 helped Wexford to the narrow win that maintained Liam MacCarthy status.
The unavailability through injury and travel of amongst others, another All Star, Chin, and nominations Liam Ryan and Conor McDonald made further inroads into the team’s sustainability at the top level.
On Saturday evening in Wexford Park, Rossiter was at pains to draw a line under the retirements.
“We need to stop talking about who’s gone. That’s in the past now and we need to move on with the squad that we have and focus on the next game. We’ll have a couple back the next day but again we need to show what we showed in the second half because if we go out the way we did in the first half, the same results are going to come. That can’t happen again.”
Yet when talking about how the county needed to fast-track players from under-age, the manager slipped into referencing the retirements. The weight of the absentee burden can’t be easily discounted.
Exacerbating their injury woes, for instance, replacements had to be found in the 15th and 23rd minutes for experienced players, Simon Donohoe and Rory O’Connor: under-20s, Cian Molloy and Cillian Byrne. Another under-20, Simon Roche came on at half-time.
Not alone are experienced, physically mature players out injured but so too are some of the younger cohort’s most physically imposing hurlers, like Eoin Whelan and Seán Rowley.
There was an icy bleakness to the weekend visit of Kilkenny. Since David Fitzgerald arrived in 2017, Wexford have enjoyed a period of competitiveness in league and championship with their oldest rivals. Saturday was the first home defeat in the fixture since 2018. A calamitous first half of unforced errors and inability to make any impact on the visitors’ defence was partially redeemed by a battling second half that kept things vaguely respectable.
It’s not as if all of this has gone unnoticed. The county have been furiously revamping their development systems. Niall Williams, a respected coaching figure, was appointed director of hurling three years ago. Between internal and commercial funding, €250,000 a year is being spent on a ‘next generation’ project.
Everything, from athletic performance to the fortunes of the county’s under-15 champions at Féile has been put under the microscope. The under-20s have reached Leinster finals but none of this is a quick fix, as could be seen on Saturday night.
That’s one of the reasons why the league is important. Not alone is it good for morale and team development against quality opposition to be in Division 1A but it is reckoned that Wexford will lose between €50,000 and €60,000 in lower gate receipts if – as appears increasingly likely – they are relegated.
Wexford suffers a bit from being a dual county. Their tradition is 50-50 between hurling and football even if their hurling heritage is predominant for more than 70 years.
Former county chair Micheál Martin told The Irish Times two years ago that he felt the county was losing out on funding because many of its clubs were dual and treated the same as those that weren’t.
“We have 45 dual clubs and Westmeath – again, I’m not being critical, just illustrating our situation – have around 35 football, 12 hurling and two dual clubs.
“So, they’ve roughly the same affiliations but my question to Croke Park is do you want our dual clubs to affiliate twice, effectively to deregister and start all over again so there’s a proper reflection of activity?”
Next stop for Keith Rossiter’s team is Ennis in a fortnight to take on the All-Ireland champions Clare, who are also pointless at the bottom of the table. The league is demanding and with six matches in eight weeks, not easy to navigate with a weakened panel.
Then it’s into championship with a similar format but faster, more intense hurling. Wexford have been All-Ireland quarter-finalists twice in the last three years and getting out of Leinster is a target every year but as the generation that won Leinster in 2019 moves on, increasingly difficult.
The province has also suffered in terms of relevance. For all its firepower Kilkenny are now 10 years without an All-Ireland. There is a sense that Munster hurling is better organised at club and development level. Already, the province has won seven All-Irelands in a row, equalling the record, also set by southern counties in 1940-46 and 1948-54.
You won’t get attractive odds on the current Munster counties breaking that record in July.
Meanwhile in Wexford, for the first time since the early 1950s when the county returned to prominence, the county hurlers will have gone 29 years – and counting – since winning the All-Ireland. Liam Griffin’s team closed a 28-year gap in 1996.
At the very end of that All-Ireland final, Griffin sent on 19-year-old Paul Codd as a replacement, specifically so that Wexford would have an on-field Liam MacCarthy medallist playing for as long as possible, Codd is retired nearly 20 years at this stage.
The wait goes on while trying to keep up.
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