Henry Shefflin says pitch incursion by Davy Fitzgerald a ‘silly act’

Banning Davy Fitzgerald from the sideline won't impact on their likely championship date with Kilkenny, says Henry Shefflin, although what the Wexford manager did against Tipperary "does set a bad example".

Shefflin was commenting on Fitzgerald’s heated pitch incursion in Sunday’s league semi-final, moments after Noel McGrath had scored Tipp’s controversial goal: Wexford, assuming they beat the Leinster round-robin winners, will face Kilkenny on June 10th but even if Fitzgerald is absent as punishment, Shefflin believes his presence will still be felt.

“They’ll have plenty of time to adjust,” he said. “From a spectators’ point of view, we will miss him, but the players will know at that stage. He’s done a lot of training and stuff like that, so I don’t think it will have that much of an impact on the game itself.”

Not that Shefflin in any way condoned his action: “For me, it crossed the line. You look at it (the incident) and you go, ‘maybe’ but then I reflected on it and every club manager, novices, and this is an issue for the GAA as a whole, across the organisation, we hear it so much that in other sports how much respect there is for referees and how much respect there is for the players. I think it just looks bad.

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“Brian (Cody) was often animated on the line, but he never crossed that line. Maybe he encroached a little bit to get out to the referee but that was it. I think this was too far. To be honest, the players are out in a kind of combat area. They have enough to deal with without a manager encroaching on the pitch and they wondering what’s going on.

“Look, I think what Davy has done, what he has achieved, I don’t think any other manager could probably get that bounce so quickly. So I have no doubt that he’s a great manager. For any team, whether it by my own club team or Wexford or whoever, he will get that bounce, and he’s gotten that in Wexford, like 19,000 people in there.

“But I think it does set a bad example, yeah, because there’s so much good he does for the promotion of hurling but I think it takes away from all the good work that he and the team, the management team, have done by doing (that). And it was a silly act, I’d imagine he will reflect on it, that way, after that.”