A year ago, David Fitzgerald’s first championship match in charge of Clare against the Waterford team he managed for four campaigns ended in defeat with a hint of acrimony. Yesterday the Clare manager achieved his first championship victory with the team – and the county’s first since 2008.

They made him sweat for it, though, losing an early initiative and looking jittery for a period in the first half, their problems including the opening concession of 1-1 to Waterford.

“We probably looked nervous in that patch when we lost the goal,” said Fitzgerald. “We still kept trying but we just lost our way a small bit. But what would you expect with that young bunch we have? That’s what I was trying to tell people today. It will happen for them. This is a good bunch. It might not be this year but it will come for them. They are the real deal – they will work very hard and they’re as honest as they come.

“They just need to mature and I hope people give them time to mature. I thought they played unreal stuff for the last 20 minutes. When is the game in the melting pot? The last 20 minutes and I thought we showed unbelievable composure and character and fair play to them. But we know we have a process and we’ll stay at that, no matter what ye try and say . . .”

Having opened up an early four-point lead they trailed by four at half-time but everything was under control:

“Half-time was very relaxed, the same way as I am now. They’ll give you everything. They just lost their way and I’ve said it so often that there are so many of them under 22 years of age. They were going into a big battle, they got hit with a rock and they came back to win.

"They're good lads and I have great belief in them and, as I keep saying, this is a process. If people want to keep building us up, no problem but we're not buying into it.

Process
"We have a process ahead of us and we don't look any further than Cork the next day because we have too much respect to do that.

For captain Patrick Donnellan the bad phase was a personal set-back, as his miss-hit pass out of defence set up the Waterford goal.

“Yeah, it was very big, to be honest, for me personally especially for giving away a stupid ball. We were probably trying to be too perfect at the start, trying to hit the 100 per cent ball every time rather than just giving the 70/75 per cent ball. You’ll get setbacks, goals against you, points against you - as long as you don’t drop the head, keep going, there’ll be no problem.”

That belief was rewarded by the two second-half goals that turned the match. “Yeah, any championship game you need goals,” said Donnellan, “it gives you a lift and can be the deciding factor – more often than not the team that gets the goals gets the win, as opposed to the team that gets the most scores.”

Waterford manager Michael Ryan had probably played his hand as best he could, having been dealt a couple of injuries in defence in the run-up to the match and losing Brian O’Halloran in the first half with injury.

“After half-time we had four good chances, we needed to take one or two of those. But we missed those chances and gave Clare a lifeline. Then they got a bit of a run on us, they got a couple of points in a row and then they got a goal and there was no catching them then.

“We’d some wides from some very good positions as well, you have to take your chances when it matters and we didn’t do that today.”