Waterford hurling boss Davy Fitzgerald has defended his decision not to start Austin Gleeson against Cork last Sunday.
“If people are surprised, they need their heads examined. Austin Gleeson had no training done in seven or eight weeks. It would be totally irresponsible of me to put him out there, absolutely brain dead to do something like that. You don’t put out a guy who has played no full game yet this year because of injury then got back and got a good block of training done and then was out again for seven weeks and did not train. That is actually ridiculous. Whoever is listening to stuff like that, they would want to cop themselves on. Will he be in contention for the next day? We’ll see how the two weeks go at training. Yeah, we could have started Austin but we would have to pull him off after 40 minutes. I’d prefer to finish with Austin rather than start with him. Grand, asking a lot with nine points down but other teams have been seven, eight or nine points down and come back. I don’t accept that one. I would like to think that we would weigh up things sensibly. I’m happy with the decision that we made.”
Davy Fitzgerald was speaking at the launch of The Dillon Quirke Foundation fundraising drive in Clonoulty–Rossmore.
Listen back to the full interview from Friday's Lár Na Páirce show.
