The Waterford and Wicklow footballers will meet for the eighteenth time in seventeen seasons in Aughrim on Sunday afternoon.
Former Déise boss John Kiely faced the Garden County during the noughties in the league and the Tommy Murphy Cup when Mick O'Dwyer was in charge. "There was a bit of razzmatazz. Arthur French, a Mayo man who lives in Kildare, was bringing Mick O'Dwyer down and he had a helicopter. One day they were coming down from some wedding in JP McManus' place and they landed in the helicopter in the next field. Before the Tommy Murphy Cup game in the summertime."
Kiely saw his charges earn a share of the spoils in 2009 before John Owens managed to pull off a rare win in 2012. "Every time we went up there, we put up a good performance against them. We never beat them up there, we just got the draw. There was a couple of games we could have won but it's no good talking about what you could have done the bottom line is they are a hard team to play in Aughrim."
Wicklow won by a point twelve months ago and it finished level when they met in Aughrim in 2018. "It's always been tight between Wicklow and Waterford. Aughrim is worth a few points to a Wicklow team so it will be interesting to see how the boys man up to it. It would be great if we could get a couple of points on the board and get the thing up and running. There's nothing to be ashamed about last week, they put in a decent effort against Limerick."
