Jamie Barron admits that he had an image of Davy Fitzgerald that was quickly discarded once the Clare man became his manager.
Although Fitzgerald is now in his second spell as Waterford boss, Paraic Mahony’s retirement earlier this year meant that there wasn’t a single playing survivor from his first stint, which ended in 2011.
Barron is one of Waterford’s most experienced players now but just missed him, having first come into the team in 2013.
“I suppose everyone has the same preconceptions of Davy and it’s not until you meet him that you realise what sort of a person he is,” says the midfielder.
“Everyone has a picture in their head of what Davy’s like but Davy’s a lovely fella behind it all. He looks out for each and every one of us, he looks out for his backroom team and he’s a big family man so you can’t fault any man, they’re his principles.
“He’ll look out for us and hopefully we can repay him by implementing all the information that he’s giving us and produce this year.”
He added: “He makes sure that we're enjoying training as well as putting in all the hard work. He brings a lot of educational stuff to us, loads of learning.
“It's just for us players now to be able to take on board all the information he's giving us and try to implement it out on the field of play.”
Fitzgerald is the fifth Waterford manager that Barron has played for and admits that his regime is different to what he’s been exposed to before.
“It’s a lot of talk and it’s a lot of assessing, a lot of analysis. Stuff that we mightn’t have been too used to in the past with different managements.
“It’s all stuff, when you see it, you think to yourself, ‘Jeaney, how didn’t we think of that before?’ but yeah, look, it’s a new way for us and we’ll see how it goes for us and we’ll see what benefits we do get out of his style of thinking.”
Waterford could hardly have a more difficult assignment for their Championship opener than three-in-a-row All-Ireland champions Limerick in Thurles on Sunday, particularly given that they’re set to be without key men Austin Gleeson, Iarlaith Daly and Shane McNulty.
“They bring high levels of skill, they bring lots of composure, they’re all very comfortable on the ball, they know what they’re doing at all times, they just work in tandem,” says Barron of John Kiely’s side.
“Look, it’s about trying to break it down, trying to break their rhythms of play, break their style of play which is obviously a lot easier said than done.
“They’re the things that every team is trying to do when they go out and play against them and some day they’re going to be beaten and hopefully we can be there to step in and take over.”
Waterford have the poorest record of the five counties in the Munster Championship over the three stagings of the round robin format since 2018. Walsh Park hasn’t proven to be particularly advantageous to them as they’ve won just one of four games there, but they revert to Thurles for this campaign as their home ground is being overhauled.
“I suppose it’s something that we haven’t really looked too much into. We’re not in Walsh Park this year so that’ll be out of play I suppose for us.
“Look, it’s hard to pinpoint and say what exactly has went wrong in those three years.
“It’s been very disappointing as a player but all we can do is look forward to 2023 now and hopefully we can change the little bit of history.”
This year they’ll have had a five-week lay-off between being eliminated from the League to their first Championship game; it was only a fortnight last year after they went all the way in the secondary competition.
In the meantime they’ve been away on a training camp in Portugal.
“Maybe we're not in the limelight of other teams where they can look at us and suss it out that bit easier,” notes Barron. “So look, we're coming in after a lay-off and hopefully it'll stand to us a bit more than the way it panned out for us last year.”
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