DAVY FITZGERALD has a habit of staring off into the distance when talking. It's hard to know how far he's looking ahead with this Waterford team, but at least he's not looking back, and that's good enough for now.

"Well, sure it's working fairly well anyway," he said, his pulse somewhere back to normal levels after another high-pressure finish in the hurling championship. "It's just hard to know when you're down in the sideline, how to weigh it all up. But what I'm happy about from that game, is that when things turned against us, two or three times, we didn't give up. We stayed with it, and trust me, the tide did turn against us a few times. We all know it still wasn't our best performance. The same problems arose. We conceded three goals, and maybe scored one of them ourselves. You can't be doing stupid things like that. We have to stop the goals going in . . ."

Waterford have three weeks to prepare for the semi-final meeting with Munster champions Tipperary, and even with his fast-adopted managerial skills, Fitzgerald didn't have to try too hard to keep that challenge in check.

"We all know inside there we wouldn't keep up with Tipperary for half an hour, if we played again the way we did there. We're going to have to improve massive on that, and everyone that's out there knows that.

"I mean we have some amount of work to do. We need the breather too, but we'll work hard after that. That game slipped away from us, and they came back. They never threw in the towel. Kept believing. And I'm happy with that. And we're back in the semi-final, the furthest they've gone at any stage. We're back there again, with no hope. So we'll just go in and give it a lash."

A week ago he was praising Eoin Kelly for his 2-13 against Offaly; this time, he was able to pick out all six forwards: "You mean we're not a one-man team? Like one or two journalists said last week?" (Not me!)

"Ah, sure you can get lucky every now and again. It took John Mullane a bit to get into it as well, but you'd always hold out hope he'd get onto the ball, and once he gets on to one he's flying it.

"And listen, people have been criticising Dan Shanahan. I've been criticised for not taking him off the last day. I had that feeling he'd come good. He's working very hard at training, he's very honest. I've fought these lads before in battles, but to be honest, you don't know anyone, until you come down to judge them. These guys have been exceptional in the way they've applied themselves."

Wexford manager John Meyler may someday win a Nobel Prize for positivism, and yet he had good reason to feel positive about what happened. Wexford played well and contested, and while experience probably let them down in the end, at least they're gaining that the whole time.

"It's a very positive day, in a way, for us, if we can build on that," he said. "And that's what I said inside in the dressingroom. Next Wednesday we'll have a chat, see where we're going, but there's no need to be down, doom or gloom, or anything like that.

"We hurled with composure there, for 70 minutes. At times we lacked a small bit of concentration, delivering the ball from the backs out to the forwards. But like, Mullane, and Dan came to life today. I was hoping to God they wouldn't . . . But they showed the last seven or eight years here, playing Cork in Munster finals, and so on, they showed that here today, with their composure on the ball, that our fellas kind of lacked there at certain times."

He singled out two moments that cost Wexford: Damien Fitzhenry's missed penalty (which went over the bar), and the surprisingly limited injury-time: "I brought Fitzy up, because there were still seven or eight minutes left. Like last year, against Tipperary, if we'd got that goal we'd have driven on then, and I think Waterford would have been knocked back.

"At the end then I told (Diarmuid) Lyng to put the ball over the bar, because I was sure he'd allow the puck out and whatever. But he blew up. 77 seconds. But that's the way it goes. Waterford showed that composure in the last 10 minutes, when you really need it, to stand up to the plate. That's when we lost our way a small bit."

Yet Meyler left us like a man who couldn't wait to get back to the job - although it remains to be seen if he will be given another year with Wexford: "The amount of doom and gloom in Wexford sometimes is unreal. You go down, and it's going to rain. The sun is not shining. But if we can keep that composure. Get (Darren) Stamp and (Keith) Rossiter on the field hurling, and get another couple of players back in there - But I always look on the positive."

"We all know inside there we wouldn't keep up with Tipperary for half an hour, if we played again the way we did there. We're going to have to improve massive on that, and everyone that's out there knows that