Leinster SHC/Wexford v Offaly: As the 1996 champions puck off their campaign, Seán Moran looks at where they stand now
Ten years in a flash. It all started for Wexford on the June bank holiday in 1996 with a first-round win over Kilkenny in Croke Park. A decade on, and the Ferrycarrig Hotel gleams in the sunshine and bustles with activity as a wedding party start to arrive.
It's a nostalgic setting, one of the hotels belonging to Liam Griffin, who managed the team that won that All-Ireland. The muzak tape at one stage bounces through Riverdance, the very metaphor for hurling's vivacity and potential international appeal that Griffin coined during the height of his career as an evangelist for the game.
Downstairs, amidst the quickening lunchtime trade, Damien Fitzhenry sits ready to be interviewed. Busy at work with Boggan's - a local construction supplies company feeding the demands of the boom - he's under time pressure, but, like the more familiar pressures he faces in the Wexford goal, it doesn't faze him too much.
He's now the most experienced hurler on the panel (or as he says, "I'm the oldest - put it that way,"). Ten years on from the big time, but 13 years on from where it all began.
"The biggest thing he's brought is stability," according to Griffin. "He's supremely confident and inspires a lot of confidence in full-back lines. His leadership qualities were excellent and he was able to lead from the back. His skills were worth a lot of scores to Wexford as well as the ones he stopped."
Fitzhenry predates the great success of 1996, having made his debut in that most Wexford of years 1993, when the county provided great entertainment for the hurling world, taking the NHL final to two replays and the Leinster final to one, losing in both instances with weary inevitability to Cork and Kilkenny.
Since the All-Ireland and a Leinster title that followed in 1997, times have been frustrating for the county. Kilkenny's domination of Leinster has placed even a provincial title largely out of reach apart from the memorable uprising of 2004.
But that's not the frustration. That comes from the years when thrilling, out-of-the-blue performances have been instantly qualified by inability to follow them up convincingly. Three years this decade Wexford have been All-Ireland semi-finalists and have taken two of them to replays only to flop out when it's decision time.
Tomorrow, in Nowlan Park, Wexford's hurlers face into the Guinness Leinster semi-final knowing that, for the first time since the turn of the decade, they may be about to lose even their second-best rating in the province to a young, up-and-coming Offaly side.
In recent years, controversy has seldom been far removed from the county at championship. It's a matter of public record how, a few weeks before the sensational ambush of Kilkenny, the players considered launching a putsch against management, thought better of it and, having patched up their differences with John Conran and his selectors, devised and implemented a gameplan that beat the then All-Ireland champions.
Now, in the second year under the management of Séamus Murphy, Conran's successor, there's still nagging trouble at mill. Fitzhenry acknowledges that "as usual a few players have left the panel".
Darragh Ryan, the side's spiritual leader, hasn't returned to training after injury. Fitzhenry sympathises with the decision: "There's no point in a couple of years people pointing at him limping down the street and saying, 'There's Darragh Ryan, he used to be a great hurler'."
Although Ryan's degenerative knee ailment is a more than adequate alibi, some in the county wonder whether in different circumstances he mightn't be willing to push through the pain barrier one more time.
Fitzhenry has been such a fixture in Wexford's goalmouth that it's easy to forget the circumstances of his arrival as a teenager, when the county had been experiencing a crisis in the position. Young and confident, he solved the crisis and in the 13 years since has helped define an era of exceptional goalkeepers.
Christy O'Connor, an All-Ireland club-winning goalkeeper himself and the journalist whose exceptional study of his intercounty peers, Last Man Standing, prominently featured Fitzhenry, says personality is a major factor in the Wexford man's success.
"His key strength is he's so laid back. I saw him walking out of last year's Leinster final with three hurleys under his arm. If that was Davy Fitz, he'd have six or seven. I'm not saying he's not methodical, but he's very relaxed. In 2001, he let in a howler from Begley, but then goes up the field and stitches two penalties to win the match. He doesn't get rattled.
"He has great natural talent. You've got to remember that he plays outfield with his club, in the forwards, and is a prolific scorer. He's very comfortable coming off his line to take a ball. In '96 they played him at wing back and I think that gave him great confidence. His handling against Kilkenny that year was excellent."
Griffin agrees and expands on the redeployment: "We were experimenting with everything. He was a very talented outfield player and we thought maybe it would be easier to find a new 'keeper than an outfield player. We were wrong about that but it brought him on in leaps and bounds."
In 2004 Fitzhenry was at the heart of the Leinster title win. His puck-outs, delivered precisely into a kinetic, revolving set of forwards, was the basis of the tactical coup that derailed Kilkenny. And when Offaly threatened to make the final a most impressive entry in the log of Wexford's inability to sustain form, it was Fitzhenry whose saves kept the match within reach.
"The puck-out wouldn't have been his forte originally," says Griffin. "He'd have been going for a longer puck-out. To be fair, Donal Óg Cusack invented this but all goalkeepers have to take it on board now.
"A goalkeeper restarts the game on average about 18 times. It's only logical that he should use it to his advantage."
With a perhaps surprising resignation, Fitzhenry is downbeat about 2004, suspecting the deflated performance in the Leinster final was proof the air was hissing out of the pumped-up urgency that had overcome Kilkenny.
"In that year we were after going up to Croke Park in four or five years, pucking the ball long and the Kilkenny half-back line being great men to catch the ball. We decided to do something about it. Like all those plans they work well for you one day but they're well looked at by your next opposition and there's going to have to be something different the next day.
"Instead of knuckling down and running hard probably we thought that we'd enough done and that might get us through the rest of the year."
He's no stranger to the knuckling down and has been doing so in recent months in advance of his 14th championship. He says there's no epiphany, no moment of clarity at the start of each year that tells him what's on the horizon. He had no inkling that 1996 would be their year. That sort of stuff was purged out of him early.
"You start off and every year's going to be your year," he says. "I came in in 1993 when we had the great three matches with Cork and two against Kilkenny.
"Starting off that year we thought we were going to have a right cut at this and have a right run. But those things don't happen unless you're really lucky.
"We put in an awful lot of hard work in 1995 and '96 and it went well for us in '96 and we won a Leinster in '97. Then it took us another seven years to get another one."
He has hurled through a revolution: the rise of new counties, a new Croke Park (his first season was before a rivet had been removed in the old ground), radical championship changes, new job specs for goalkeepers and the intensifying demands on players.
"There's a lot more work goes into it now than when I started in 1993," he says. "Your job back then was to simply stop the ball. Now it's gone into a sort of a science. You've so many puck-outs in a game. You have the ball in your hand and it's up to goalkeepersto make the best of that possession. A few years ago it was just puck it out as hard as you can up the field. Now you've got to try and make sure the possession is kept for as long as possible.
"Back then you'd turn up twice a week, hurl around the ball, do a few laps of the field and a few sprints. Now you've physical trainers, dieticians. Our club had a championship replay last Sunday. On Sunday we had to be in Wexford Park for the under-21 team. On Thursday we were in New Ross to play Waterford. On Friday evening we had to get the bus to go to Galway. Played on Saturday and didn't leave Galway until Sunday morning. It wouldn't have been heard of 10 or 12 years ago."
Raise the subject of 2004 and tentatively enquire whether ambitions might have been pitched a bit low, a bit too easily satiated by the Kilkenny result. Ask would the players have targeted the All-Ireland or had the Leinster semi-final exclusively filled their horizon.
"From this end here I don't think the like of ourselves can look forward to All-Ireland honours at the start of the year, there's so many hurdles along the way. I presume Cork look at the ultimate from the word go but we've had so many tough matches over the years and when we beat Kilkenny, Offaly beat us and when we beat Offaly, Kilkenny beat us. Down here we look to the provincial title first of all and then we have to look farther but only then."
Exacerbating the difficulties at senior level is the demoralisation at underage. By now Dublin are established as the second most successful county in these age groups after Kilkenny. Earlier this season the Wexford minors were defeated by Carlow, a great result for the neighbours but another hammer blow to self-esteem in the county.
It's an area in which Fitzhenry has involved himself. His school of hurling in the Enniscorthy area was established two years ago and annually takes six young hurlers from each of the 11 local clubs. The idea is to get the best out of them systematically and bring them up to minor level.
This year the idea is to be extended into Wexford town with the Rory McCarthy school. A similar scheme, the Ash project, has been set up around New Ross and there are hopes that this could be replicated in Gorey, thus covering the four main population centres in the county.
Fitzhenry believes this assiduous cultivation will all but guarantee a panel of 30 minors capable of competing with Kilkenny and Dublin.
"I'd be confident about the future. Last week we launched Club Wexford, similar to Club Tyrone, where we get businesses on board to pledge money for the next 10 years into a pool to get Wexford back onto the map. There's no point saying that we haven't struggled at underage in recent years. But I wouldn't be in despair. These schemes I think will turn the tide in three or four years."
Development work of a more far-reaching nature also occupies his time, as Fitzhenry is fronting a fund-raising drive in the parish of Kiltealy, which will see a new school built in Gambia, scheduled to open in September.
"It puts things in perspective," he says. "When someone's getting worked up over a game - you know, 'What are you doing on that team?' - I can just say, 'Listen you'd want to see how the other half lives or tries to live'."
The perspective this weekend will be the familiar one of watching and guiding Wexford's unfolding championship challenge. His career is moving towards its close - "two, three more years: that'd probably see it out".
Time flies. But he's spent it well.
