Davy Fitzgerald says trying to get his adopted Antrim hurlers to play the way he wants is ‘like teaching someone how to walk again’.
The Clare man said the early days of his latest managerial project have been hectic with the new coaching staff identifying several key areas where significant improvement is required.
Fitzgerald said fitness is the first issue whilst he revealed that poring over two years of Antrim footage also highlighted ‘four or five’ other areas of deficit.
The former All-Ireland winning manager said that having stuck rigidly to the December 7 return date for collective training - something he reckons other counties ignored - he has been left with just six full weeks to prepare for the National League.
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He lamented the absence of pre-season competitions and said that by the time the league starts, Antrim will have played challenge games against the county’s U-20s, Meath, Limerick, Derry and Down.
Speaking at the launch of the latest season of his Londis-sponsored Ireland’s Fittest Family show on RTE, Fitzgerald even said the new job is ‘a bit overwhelming, even for myself’.
“We’ve come across four or five areas that we believe that we can try to help them be better at,” said Fitzgerald. “When you do that, it’s nearly like teaching someone to walk again. You have to go back and take your time.
“They would have gone out (in the past) and played hurling probably without thinking and doing it. I have to make this clear, they need to do this for definite, a few of the things.
“When you have to think about it, it’s harder because you’re going out in the field and you think, ‘I have to do this’.”
Fitzgerald is hoping his new style will become more natural to the players in a matter of months but said the prospect of playing Dublin, whom he watched this week in a challenge against Limerick, in their league opener on Saturday week at Croke Park is daunting.
Fitzgerald said combining punishing fitness work with a heavy focus on tactical arrangements and formations has been a tricky balancing act.
There was some brief downtime last weekend when the players had a night out together and ‘ended up in Sixmilebridge’, where he lives.
“We went go-karting before we had our dinner and a few drinks and a few songs, they were only mad to nail me in the go-karting, and I wouldn’t blame them,” smiled the former Clare, Wexford and Waterford boss.
“I would love [it] if I had another five or six weeks. I’m going into the lion’s den (Croke Park) and it’s very hard in that length of time because as I told you, fitness wasn’t where it should be.
So you’re working hard on that and you’re trying to get the technical side of it at the same time, which is tough, because they’re very tired when they’re training hard, and they have trained really hard.”
Fitzgerald claimed he was initially ready to retire from county management when his second spell as Waterford chief ended last July.
“I genuinely, genuinely, genuinely thought I wouldn’t be going back in,” he said, revealing that an old friend ‘who was always there for me’ convinced him to consider Antrim.
Confirming that Neil McManus, Antrim’s performance coach, definitely won’t be returning in a playing capacity, Fitzgerald added that improving the team’s ‘cat’ away record is a big target in 2025.
“It is cat, it is f***ing terrible,” he said.
“It is not good and there is no point saying anything different. They are big beatings and we have got to stop that. When they are in Corrigan, they are very competitive. The away form is a big thing, we have talked about that.”