Ger Fitzgerald - in his own words

Midleton and Cork hurling legend Ger Fitzgerald was laid to rest yesterday. In this excerpt from the book Cork Hurling: Game of My Life, he recalled how the 1990 Munster final win over Tipperary held a special place for him

You’ve heard of the phrase ‘flying in training’ – well in 1990, I was flying to training!

I was working for Aer Lingus in Dublin Airport at the time and I was flying up and down for training, twice or three times a week, depending on what was required. I’d come down and my mother Liz would collect me at the airport and drop me to training, back up the next morning and back to work. She had been around the block with the inter-county scene as my father Paddy played for Cork – he was part of the successful 1966 panel – and was now doing the same with her son.

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It started off dampish. I was in corner-forward and I was marking Bobby Ryan. You’d be watching the fella who you’d be up against and I had six-stud boots on and I noticed he had multi-studs. Particularly in the first half, the surface was wet and you know that if you turn a fella fast, he wouldn’t be as quick to get you. Small little things like that give you a bit of an edge and a bit of confidence.

Tipp were raging-hot favourites and, in fairness to them, they had a serious team when you look at those players. They had a right to be favourites, given that we didn’t have a lot of form. In saying that, we still had eight or nine of the team that won the All-Ireland in 1986. There wasn’t a lot of notice taken of that but I think that was significant in that a good few of us had been through the mill and knew the craic. We were experienced, without getting the acknowledgement for that before the match. I suppose there was a bit of complacency with Tipperary, that would be fair to say, but at the same time they did start the game fairly well and it took us a while to get into it.

The longer we stayed in it, the more confident we got and Mark Foley got a great goal just before half-time to give us a significant boost going in. We were well in the hunt. In 1988, they had got ahead of us early and they dominated but we were well in the game and we were playing pretty decent.

Fitzy [John Fitzgibbon] got two goals and Foley got another one and that made a massive difference. When you’re playing a game like that and you get goals, confidence grows. It was a tough match to the end but we hurled very well as a team and we came of age as a group that day, I think. If you looked at it, five of the six forwards would have been noted goalscorers – you had Kevin, Fitzy, Mul, myself and Foley and Sully would be the only fella who’d hit it over the bar! To be fair to him, he was prolific at that and he had a very good game in the Munster final.

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Antrim in the All-Ireland semi-final could be a banana skin but we played well and we beat them. That put us up against Galway again and they had won two in a row since we beat them in 1986.

They were a very good team, they had been dominating with Tipp, but we wouldn’t have been lacking in confidence taking them on, either.