All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Quarter-Final

Wexford v Waterford, Semple Stadium, 2pm (RTE)

By John Harrington

The psychological impact of the hammering they took from Tipperary in the Munster Final has been held up by some as Waterford’s greatest issue going into this All-Ireland Quarter-Final.

The inference is that their confidence might been shot to pieces and they may no longer have an iron-clad belief in the system of play that manager Derek McGrath has devised over the past couple of years.

That’s a hard argument to swallow. As bad as that five-goal drubbing was, it’s doubtful the latent memory of it will inhibit Waterford going into this game.

If anything, they’ll be hell-bent on flushing the memory of it from their system by reminding everyone just how much progress they've made as a team since 2014.

Their U-21 players certainly looked in the right frame of mind when they went out again three days after that defeat to Tipperary and stormed to victory over Clare in the Munster U-21 Semi-Final. That must have been a cathartic experience for players like Austin Gleeson, Patrick Curran, and Shane Bennett, and their more senior colleagues will be keen to do something similar against Wexford on Sunday.

Derek McGrath knows these players intimately having coaching many of them since they were school-kids, and the Waterford manager sounds confident their reaction to their Munster Final adversity will be a positive one.

“We have a very resilient group of lads,” he said this week. “With any defeat of that nature, there’s a process whereby the first person you look at is yourself. We do that as a management, the players look at themselves and then you park it immediately.

“If you wallow in it, it becomes worse and it becomes a post-mortem to the point where everything is dissected. The reality is some of our players just under-performed on the day and that can happen in any level of sport or walk of life. We’re hopeful now that we can rectify those things and just work as hard as we have been working up to that.

"We don't think that there'll be any long-term effects from the nature of the defeat."

It won’t take us too long to gauge Waterford’s psychological well-being on Sunday because Wexford will bring the game to them and ask them hard questions about their appetite for the battle.

Liam Dunne’s team were comfortably the better team against Cork in the Round 2 Qualifier and should have won by more than a three-point winning margin. They fought harder for any contested ball, they were defensively solid, and in attack had offered a range of different stylistic threats in Lee Chin, Conor McDonald, David Dunne, and Liam Óg McGovern.

They’ll have noted too how Waterford’s sweeper system struggled to cope with Tipperary’s direct approach in the Munster Final, and they have the players to effectively implement a similar tactic themselves.

There are few better ball-winners playing at full-forward in the current game than Conor McDonald, though Wexford will rue they will be without another battering ram in the shape of Podge Doran who suffered a knee injury against Cork.

Tipperary’s direct approach was the percentage one in the Munster Final because the terrible weather conditions made short-passing more difficult and also meant high, dropping balls were tricky for Waterford defenders to win cleanly. The conditions are expected to be more clement on Sunday and the chances are Tadhg de Búrca will have a more effective outing in his sweeping role.

Wexford will need variation in their play if they’re to pull off an upset, something that their manager Liam Dunne admitted himself during the week.

“Waterford are not going to change at this stage, irrespective of what happened in the Munster final, as up to then their plan had served them well,” said Dunne. “We will have to adapt to meet the Waterford system and use our heads, as it may not be of use pumping high ball continually in on top of three to four defenders.

“When we met in the League, we adapted and coped with their plan, so it’s just a case of bringing our own game and applying the pressure on Waterford.”

Their chances of victory have not been helped by the likely absence of corner-back James Breen who suffered a bout of viral meningitis last week. He was superb against Cork, and isn’t easily replaced.

Liam Ryan would be the most obvious man to come in if Breen can't prove his fitness, but he hasn’t played for almost two months because of injury, so it would be a risk pitching him into a contest such as this one.

Wexford have done to made it this far considering they are already without Andrew Shore, Shane Tomkins, and David Redmond because of injury, and Jack Guiney because of unavailability.

If they can reproduce the level of performance they reached against Cork then they'll put it up to Waterford and test whether or not the Deise are suffering a crisis of confidence after the Munster Final. But it’s a big ask for a team with so many big players missing to beat this Waterford outfit at full-strength.