Davy Fitz talks heart disease, family, SHC hopes and 850km round trip to Antrim (2025)

Let's get the ground covered out of the way first.

Davy Fitzgerald will set out from his home in Sixmilebridge some time around 10am for a Tuesday evening training session and pick up Michael Collins, known as ‘Gazzy’, his long-time kitman and companion, and Conor Dolan, who is part of his wider coaching team. Both live locally.

He’ll point his car for Limerick and head out the N18 before joining the M7 motorway, stopping off at the Midway Food Court in Portlaoise to meet with Pat Bennett, who has been his sage right-hand man for the majority of his managerial assignments over the years. And it’s there that we also join the travelling party, the five of us pulling out of Portlaoise just before midday.

Between collecting and dropping, Fitzgerald reckons the round trip to Antrim’s training base in Dunsilly, north of Belfast, comes to about 850km. For Pat, coming from Ballysaggart in Waterford, it’s 970km. If Fitzgerald’s tank is full of diesel leaving the ‘Bridge, it’ll be empty when he gets home at around 1.30am, some 15 hours after leaving. It is, he declares, “a hoor of a drive”.

“But we enjoy it, don’t we Michael?” he says to Gazzy. “Yeah!” he replies. “They rushed me the last day, after I coming out of the shower. Davy says, ‘We’re going in four minutes’. I hadn’t my eyebrows done, I hadn’t washed my teeth, I couldn’t dry my hair!”

“You need to get that hair cut,” Davy tells him. “I want that hair cut before we play Championship, first round.”

Gazzy is 87 but remarkably fresh for it. More on that later. He sits in the back, between Pat and Conor, and there is a hum of conversation and laughter all the way up the road as the car snakes up the M7 and onto the M50 before joining the M1 to Belfast.

“Could be worse though Davy,” says Conor. “You could be driving bad roads!”

“Do you reckon?!”

**********

There is plenty of chat in the car but then the journey presents an opportunity to work through various logistical matters that confront an inter-county manager, not to mention a husband and father. And so there are plenty of phone calls too.

12.36pm: It’s Justin McCormack. He’s querying if there’ll be an in-house game at training tonight. There will be. Timings for the coaches to arrive and other arrangements around gear are discussed. Justin is ostensibly the videographer but he’s become much more than that.

12.39pm: Stephen Rooney calls. Antrim’s trusty corner-back but also part of their leadership group and players’ rep. They mainly talk fundraising. Antrim just got back from a training camp in Portugal last week, which the players and management raised the money for. There was a social event built around training last weekend which the players’ partners were included in. All went off well, but these things have to be paid for.

There’s a golf classic coming up in Templepatrick on April 12 for which they expect, and need, to raise at least Stg£30,000. They’ve got 34 teams confirmed and hope to get to 40.

12.59pm: There’s a check-in with his son, Daithí Óg, who turns three later this month. He’s with his childminder, Anne Marie, while Fitzgerald’s wife Sharon is at work. This is followed up by a brief chat with his parents, Pat and Nuala, too.

He’ll talk to his infant son a few more times before the day is out.

DAITHÍ ÓG

Fitzgerald insists that, in his own mind, he was done with inter-county management once he stepped back from Waterford last year. The primary reason was to spend more time with Daithí Óg. Waterford’s early elimination meant that they got a good summer and then a friend from Antrim pleaded with him to come on board.

Eventually, he relented, but spending large chunks of the week away from his family is difficult.

“I FaceTime him once or twice a day, especially when I’m travelling and that means a lot to me that I can see that he’s ok because I treasure my days with him. Sharon normally goes to work around eight o’clock. I’d hold him most times till 10 or 11 o’clock if I can and he’ll go to the childminder after that but I love my few hours with him in the morning.”

Now 53, he reckons that the number of hours he puts into Antrim comes “some place between 60 and 80” on a weekly basis. For a man with a well-documented history of heart trouble - he first had stents inserted when he was still in his 30s - it’s a sizeable undertaking.

“Do I worry about my health? One-hundred percent. I have heart disease. That’s there. I try and keep on top of it as much as I can. I want to be around as long as I can. Not for hurling. For my family.

“The last number of years has been difficult for a few reasons in hurling. Like there’s an awful lot of great people in Clare but there is a few people who haven’t been nice and the way they’ve done things hasn’t been nice and it hasn’t been nice for the family either but I’m so delighted we’ve kept the head down and kept working away.

“But the most important thing to me is the family and the health.”

1.50pm: By now, we’re over the border and it’s prudent to have a fuel stop.

“There’s some difference in the price of the diesel - 20 to 25 cent cheaper,” says Conor.

2.30pm: We pull in at the Dunsilly Bar and Grill, a stone’s throw from Antrim’s training ground and where we’ll have lunch. Gazzy has been ribbed about picking up the tab on the way.

“He’s had that 50 sterling for about four weeks!”

3.30pm: We arrive at Antrim GAA’s sparkling High Performance Centre at Dunsilly. Gazzy makes the most of the gym and heads straight for the exercise bike. He’s partial to pumping a few weights too.

4pm: Management meeting starts. Teams are picked for the A v B in-house game. There are robust exchanges around where to pick certain players.

Shapes, with the first Championship game against Wexford on April 19, are mentioned.

Brendan Murphy, Antrim’s Head of Athletic Performance, arrives. He discusses various players and where they’re at fitness-wise with Fitzgerald.

“He has to play tonight,” says Davy. “We’ll bring down his load.”

Marty McLoughlin, the performance analyst, takes a seat in the corner. Fitzgerald tells him what he wants tracked before turning back to Pat Bennett to talk puckouts and how the session will be structured.

4.45pm. The meeting finishes. All the while, Gazzy sits quietly at another table, leafing through a magazine.

Where does the nickname come from?

His father was a bit of a character and enjoyed his pint. One Sunday evening, there was music in the pub and so he took out his handkerchief, placed it on the floor and danced around it, causing someone to declare how he had “great gas”.

“That’s how it came, ‘great gas’, they put that on him and that was the way it was,” says his now octogenarian son, to whom the nickname has been passed on.

He served as an umpire on the local scene in Clare for decades, long before Davy Fitzgerald started keeping goal for Sixmilebridge and long after he had finished. But it was during that period that they first became acquainted.

“Davy would be going away outside the square and I used to (say), ‘Davy, you can’t be going outside the square for the puckout. I don’t mind you putting one or two but you can’t go three yards’, I said. So Davy said, ‘Oh sorry!’”

He helped out a little with the catering when Ger Loughnane was Clare manager and when Anthony Daly took charge of the team more than 20 years ago, he made Gazzy the kitman. He stayed on under various managers for more than a decade after and was at the coalface for the 2013 All-Ireland under Fitzgerald.

A few years later, when Fitzgerald landed in Wexford and noted that Gazzy was at a loose end, he got him involved.

“I said, ‘You’re coming to Wexford, bud’. He said, ‘I’m not’. I said, ‘You’re coming’. Picked him up and he’s never missed a training session in Wexford. Lads love him. He’s a great character to have around.

“You could see he’s bubbly. He’s 87. He’s in unbelievable shape but he’s a great person to be around. He’s always positive. Never glass half-empty. That type of a person is invaluable. I remember one day he said to me, ‘Please don’t let me stop, keep me going as much as you can’. I love having him around.”

Gazzy says that his involvement helps to keep him young.

“It does, it does. When Davy talks to you and asks you something, he doesn’t take no for an answer. I said, ‘I have enough of it’. I was in Waterford for two years, we were in Wexford for five years and we were in Cork camogie for another year. I used to say to him, ‘Davy I have enough’ and he’d say, ‘No, this will be good for you’.”

Is he right?

“Yeah,” he laughs. “I would say that. I’d have to say that.”

5.15pm: The management meeting resumes. Arron Graffin and Paudie Shivers, Fitzgerald’s other selectors, have now arrived. The tactical talk intensifies. More on shapes. The level of detail is impressive, but any more information than that would breach the terms of our attendance today.

5.42pm: Players are now arriving in dribs and drabs. One is taken into the meeting to discuss his role.

5.47pm: The meeting ends.

6.15pm: Meeting of players and management. Fitzgerald sets the tone from the top of the room and calls out the teams for the A v B game.

“To get into the top 26 is a massive thing here guys. Could any of ye guys be in the 26? One hundred and ten percent. Are ye going to fight like f**k?”

Again, there is much tactical detail for the players to digest.

Arron Graffin and Conor Dolan will take the A team. Pat Bennett and Paudie Shivers take the B team.

6.40pm: The players go to the gym for activation.

What does Fitzgerald want out of this session?

“Tonight will be mainly a match, an in-house game, just to see form and see where lads are at. We’re not 100% there on exactly who’s going to play, who’s not going to play.

“We have a fair idea but we need to see a really intense game tonight of training and we need a few of them. We’re not playing many challenge games so we need our in-house games to be really good.”

7pm: Training starts on the field. Graffin is shouting the instructions as the players fine-tune their striking in various pods.

7.07pm: The players go through some runs with Brendan Murphy.

7.22pm: Back into a drill that combines striking and handpassing. Balls are sticking.

“That was really good,” Fitzgerald tells them. “We’ve got to drive on the rest of training. No holding back tonight.”

7.32pm: Now onto a shooting drill, with their manager imploring them to be “ruthless”.

7.40pm: A v B game starts. Seán Hawes, the goalkeeping coach who played in goal for both Clare and Antrim, has the whistle. Fitzgerald is out in the middle of the field while the game progresses.

7.50pm: He calls one of the teams in for a word and takes his place behind the goal as play resumes.

8pm: Half-time.

8.08pm: Second half starts. The first half was competitive and there is plenty of healthy needle still apparent.

8.32pm: Full-time. Of course, the scoreline is contested. There are debriefs with both teams.

8.41pm: The players make their way off the field.

8.45pm: Food is being served back inside by caterers. Chicken and pasta. Vegetable soup. A range of nice brown bread. Various other bits and pieces.

So, how was that?

“We had an A versus B which is great, so you had a lot of lads who are very p****d off that they’re not on the A team so they’re going to absolutely bring the game but that’s brilliant for the A team,” says Fitzgerald.

“Will there be changes? There’ll be one or two anyway but it was great. I think the game was pretty intense, which was good. The training was good in general. We still have a lot of work to do.

“My intention, 100%, was to finish after Waterford. I did not envisage getting back in, but this bunch has given me everything.”

And now the long drive home stretches out before us.

“I’m not looking forward to it but the good thing is you have company in the car and we have the craic. I think you’ve seen that. There’s a good chemistry in the car and if you have a good chemistry in the car, unreal.”

9.18pm: We pull out of Dunsilly. There’s a check-in with Sharon and Daithí Óg as we go out the gate.

9.30pm: Discussion of A v B game kicks off the car as it’s picked apart. It lasts 25 minutes, but it will be pored over more once the video lands the next day.

9.55pm: The night’s soccer results are tossed out. Reading lost 3-0 at Blackpool. Not good. Fitzgerald has been good friends with Reading manager Noel Hunt since his first stint with Waterford.

10.45pm: A phone call is made to plan the Sunday’s session, though they’ll train again on Friday first.

12.10am: We’re back at the Midway in Portlaoise, almost 12 hours since first climbing in the car. It’ll be around 1.30am before it stops in Sixmilebridge. Then they’ll do it all again on Friday, one of seven sessions before they open their Leinster Championship campaign away to Wexford on April 19.

“I’ve been told that we’re red hot favourites to be relegated,” says Fitzgerald. “But we’re gonna fight. We’re gonna fight and give it a go.”