Davy Fitzgerald has explained how he uses music to lighten the mood with his Wexford players - with goalkeeper Mark Fanning the fall guy on one occasion.
As with a number of inter-county teams nowadays, tunes blare from the Wexford dressing room on matchdays and Fitzgerald says that singing is sometimes inserted randomly at training sessions.
“Training would be tough with me at times without a shadow of a doubt,” the Wexford boss told The 2 Johnnies Podcast.
“I believe that word balance is important. I’d often say it to lads in the middle of training, and we’d be in the middle of a two-hour session, I might say it to them, ‘Ok, belt me out the best song ye have and I’ll let ye off the rest of the training’.
“Oh my God, we’ve done that loads of times. And I swear to God, the one thing I love about the Wexford lads, we’d normally sing a tune before we go out to play any match.
“Where I’ve gone to with the whole hurling thing is, be in good form, be free-spirited, go and let’s do it.”
He added: “You could do anything, anything comes out, Sweet Caroline comes out, the Purple and Gold comes out, anything could come out. They’ll come up with modern stuff.”
Fanning had been in charge of the music but, as Fitzgerald outlined, was cast aside in something of a humorous player coup.
“The boys came in to me one night in training, they said, ‘Listen, we got to sack Fanning for the craic’.
“I was in the middle of a big team talk. I says, ‘We’ll leave the team now for a sec, we have a more pressing issue. One or two guys have come to me and they’re not happy with the lad in charge of the music’.
“Fanning said, ‘What are ye on about?’ I said, ‘Fanning, we have to put this to a vote’. So we had a vote there and then to sack him and we sacked him.
“I asked them who did they want to do it? They picked a guy called Shane Reck who is one of the quietest guys on the team’. Oh my God did he stand up to the challenge.
“He has to bring the speaker, he has to pick the music that we have. If you see the craic at times they go on with, they’re just a funny bunch.”
Music, Fitzgerald says, is likely to break out at any moment in his Wexford set up.
“Every place, any place, our physio brings the guitar with him. If you look at us everyday, our physio has the guitar going with him.
“But why not? Why not? Why does it need to be all tense and all, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that’? You can have a mix of both.
“Why not have a mix of both? Now, it took me a long time to realise this. I just want lads to go out… there’s enough of pressures in life without adding hurling to it.
“If the team gives me 110% then fine, if they don’t, trust me, they’ll find out about it afterwards.”
