SEAN FLEMING admitted Wicklow have been held back by a disrupted preparation due to many players’ involvement in the Leaving Certificate examinations.
owever, he insisted that – win, lose, or draw against Tyrone in their opening game on Saturday – his side will benefit from the game and only get better.
It has been a long wait for Wicklow to play a competitive fixture. Their disappointing league final defeat to Mayo came on April 10, while the Leinster final win over Louth fell on May 15.
That latter game was their last competitive fixture, a gap of 55 days between then and their clash with Tyrone in Kinnegad this Saturday. This wait has also come as a result of the withdrawals of Donegal and Monaghan from the Nancy Murray Cup, thus leaving just Wicklow, the Red Hands, and Louth in the competition.
It all makes for a less than ideal scenario for a young Wicklow side that wants to win the competition and develop as a team. So much so that Fleming believes that the Camogie Association should consider recalibrating the championship structure.
“Going forward you would hope that the Camogie Association would look at it and maybe come up with a second-tier junior.
“They have 12 teams in the Premier Junior at the moment. It doesn’t seem to make sense to have 12 teams in Premier Junior and three teams in the Nancy Murray.
“The structure is wrong. It would be far better for development, which is the aim for the Nancy Murray.
“It would seem to make a lot more sense to restructure into a two-tier junior competition and get rid of the Nancy Murray and reduce the numbers in the Premier Junior.
“I definitely think there are teams in the Premier Junior that would benefit from taking a step down and getting more games and get into a promotion relegation relationship with the Premier Junior, rather than being in the Premier Junior and possibly getting well beaten in those.”
Wicklow’s own preparations for Saturday have been less than ideal. Nine of the panel – which amounts to 25 players in total – have spent much of the summer doing the Leaving Cert exams, while the lack of available numbers has prevented Fleming from organising challenge matches to make up for the dearth in competitive camogie in the interim.
“We have had a good bit of interruption because of the Leaving Cert. We have nine panel members who are at Leaving Cert level, so the whole preparation in June hasn’t been as good as we want.
“We have been looking after ourselves as best we can and preparing for it as best we can and the proof in the pudding will be on Saturday.
“With only three teams in the competition, it isn’t the end of the world if we do lose but you would like to get off on a strong footing and win on Saturday.
“ f we don’t win, there is room for recovery. We have the second match against Louth in two weeks and then if we win that we are in the final, probably against Tyrone as well.”
On Saturday, they will face Tyrone; results against whom embody the team’s progression over recent years. In 2021 league, they lost heavily to the Ulster county, before losing by a smaller margin in the Nancy Murray Cup semi-finals.
Then, in 2022, the fortunes were reversed when they beat the Red Hands on their way to the league final which, unfortunately, they lost to Mayo.
While he acknowledged the progression of results against Tyrone, Fleming said that he does not restrain reflection to those games.
“We obviously had a very disappointing performance against Mayo in the league final. I don’t think we did ourselves any justice in that game, at all.
“We obviously took another step forward by beating Louth in the Leinster final, but it is hard when you are playing the same team three times in the year, to properly gauge yourself. All you can do is measure yourself against yourself.
“Tyrone are after getting a few of their players back that were missing in the league. They are obviously going to be a lot stronger.
“I would prefer if our preparation was a lot better than it actually was, but we are beginning to get a bit of traction from the last few weeks.”
Fleming is already planning beyond Tyrone, with an increase in numbers hopefully leading to more challenge games.
“I would be confident – win, lose, or draw on Saturday – that we will improve from Saturday and the run out will do us good and we will try and get some matches in during July advance of the Louth match and assuming we win the Louth match, we will get another match in before we play the final.”
