Old boys prove their worth

Wexford 1-20 Waterford 0-18: Even by the standards of their perplexing tendencies Saturday night was a sickener for Waterford.

In four of the team's five big matches since winning Munster last year they have built and squandered commanding early leads. The exception, last month's replay against Limerick, is the only one they actually won.

Not only had Waterford established a six-point lead by the half-hour mark in this Guinness All-Ireland hurling qualifier at Nowlan Park, before a festival crowd of 26,000, but everything was in place for the match to be won comfortably. Their forwards were causing trouble, individually and as a unit.

Dan Shanahan, brought in to dwarf Liam Dunne under dropping ball, was doing just that and but for the intervention of goalkeeper Damien Fitzhenry, would have had two early goals. Ken McGrath had packed his radar and had four points from play. John Mullane was also taking his points and had notched three. In defence, the Waterford full backs were lords of all they surveyed.

Adrian Fenlon started as selected at centre forward and was denying Fergal Hartley clean possession but that was about as far as it went for the Leinster finalists.

Ironically, it was the feared re-occurrence of Fenlon's hamstring injury that caused Wexford manager John Conran to push the button. In the 24th minute, Larry Murphy came on for Fenlon and captain Paul Codd - up to that point largely reliving his Leinster final nightmare - came out to centre forward. The game changed. Wexford scored 1-3 without reply to level the match and only a late point by Dave Bennett saved Waterford's lead from bankruptcy.

Codd responded immediately to the switch. He made the pressure on Hartley pay with a couple of points from play and created the space for a couple more, but sent them wide.

It then became apparent that Tom Feeney, masterful up until then, was finding Murphy a handful. Fitzhenry's massive puck-outs were accordingly starting to chip away at Waterford's hitherto impregnable defence.

Murphy won a free, pointed by Codd, and in injury time, Rory Jacob got on to another break to round the defence and dextrously bat the ball one-handed into the net for the key goal.

Conran paid tribute to Codd. "We were bringing Paul out anyway. He got a couple of scores from play and brought the whole team with him. I could sense in the dressing-room at half-time we weren't going down the same road as against Kilkenny. The lads couldn't wait to get back out and they were first out for the second half."

This time, the pressure was maintained and the scoring trend for the 20 minutes around half-time was Wexford 1-6, Waterford 0-1.

It has become a feature of Waterford's depressing defeats that they find it impossible to respond to the changing trends of matches they once dominated. They weren't helped by Mullane suffering a serious eye injury that culminated in his asking to be taken off. Initial diagnosis suggested a damaged cornea but he was taken to hospital for examination.

Mullane had managed five points from play by the time of his 50th-minute withdrawal and although it would have been asking a lot of him to turn the match against a fired-up and strikingly effective Dave Guiney (making his senior return at the age of 33), his departure made more remote Waterford's receding chances.

They did hit the front briefly in the 57th minute as the match hovered around break-even, but the momentum was with Wexford.

As Conran intimated afterwards, if you're good enough you're young enough and the performances of the recalled veterans substantiated the point. There's no doubt the constricted spaces in Nowlan Park helped facilitate the impact of Murphy and Larry O'Gorman, who more than held his own at centrefield until substitution on the hour.

In truth there was little conventional play in the middle as the puck-outs were clearing the sector by some distance.

Both Waterford's starting centrefielders, Peter Queally and Tony Browne, were removed by the end without having made those switches difficult for the bench.

Of major encouragement to Conran and Wexford's irrepressible support at large will be the confidence and élan displayed in closing out the match. They outscored their opponents 0-9 to 0-3 in the closing 15 minutes and included some great points.

In other words this wasn't the familiar Wexford rain dance, which sometimes yields a deluge of goals but often doesn't. Twenty points is respectable scoring by any standards.

WEXFORD: 1 D Fitzhenry; 2 D Guiney, 3 D Ryan, 4 D O'Connor; 5 D Stamp (0-1), 6 D Ruth, 7 L Dunne; 8 L O'Gorman, 9 R McCarthy; 10 B Lambert, 11 A Fenlon (0-1), 12 M Jacob (0-2); 13 C McGrath, 14 P Codd (0-8,5fs, 65), 15 R Jacob (1-3). Subs: 29 L Murphy (0-2) for Fenlon (24 mins); 26 M Jordan (0-2) for Lambert (half-time); 22 T Mahon (0-1) for O'Gorman (59 mins); MJ Furlong for McGrath (73 mins).

WATERFORD: 1 S Brenner; 5 B Greene, 3 T Feeney, 2 D Prendergast; 7 E Murphy (0-2), 6 F Hartley, 4 J Murray; 8 T Browne, 9 P Queally; 14 D Shanahan (0-1), 12 K McGrath (0-5), 10 D Bennett (0-1); 13 J Mullane (0-5), 11 S Prendergast, 15 P Flynn (0-3, 2fs). Subs: 17 Moloney for Queally (47 mins); 9 E McGrath for Mullane (50 mins); 18 E Kelly for S Prendergast (54 mins); 22 M Walsh (0-1) for Browne (61 mins).

Referee: W Barrett (Tipperary).