Wexford legend fearful for the future once Lee Chin generation moves on
Former Wexford star Tom Dempsey was speaking having been inducted in the Gaelic Writers' Association's Hurling Hall of Fame.
Tom Dempsey admits that he fears for Wexford’s future once a number of current stalwarts pass into retirement.
After flirting with relegation to the Joe McDonagh Cup last year before a Lee Chin tour de force against Kilkenny saved their bacon, Wexford showed signs of improvement under new boss Keith Rossiter this year as they sealed a spot in the new-look Division 1A for next year and reached an All-Ireland quarter-final, losing to eventual champions Clare.
It looks as though Chin and most of his contemporaries will play on next year and while Wexford legend Dempsey is hopeful that there’s a kick in them, he worries about how the team will cope once they eventually depart.
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He said: “We have some very good young fellas and while we're not winning national titles we are competing well at under-20 and minor and we'll have a good minor team next year.
“Lee Chin is probably one of the top three Wexford hurlers I've seen in my lifetime. He's an amazing hurler. You have other great servants like Rory O'Connor, Matthew O'Hanlon, Liam Óg McGovern, Diarmuid O'Keeffe, and Kevin Foley, but when they start to step away I fear they will be hard to replace and my understanding is that Matthew O'Hanlon is possibly going to retire this year.
“A lot of those guys are in the 32/33 bracket and they will be a huge loss when they're gone and very hard to replace so that's a worry. How we develop these younger players in the next few years is going to be very important.
“I'm a little bit worried and, yet, with Wexford, we always seem to pull ourselves out of the quagmire and come up with a few results when it matters. But I am a little bit worried about how we'll cope over the next few years when these lads start to retire.”
There may be some hope for Chin and company given that Dempsey was into his 30s before he won anything of note with Wexford as they claimed Leinster and All-Ireland titles in 1996, and retained the Leinster crown the following season, after years of near misses.
“I think if it had come earlier we might have won a little bit more. Very often we were second best to Offaly or Kilkenny and were possibly the second or third-best team in the country at the time. But the problem was during my career it was knockout.
“I envy the younger fellas now who are getting five or six championship games in a year whereas we woke up on a June or July morning to play Kilkenny or Offaly and if you won you were through and if you didn't your season was over. I do think that did go against Wexford during our period.
“When you win it's easier win again. I saw that with my club Buffer's Alley where I had four county medals by the time I was 20 and had the belief that we were always going to win with our club whereas that never came with Wexford until later in my career.
“There were days we were very close. In 1993 I was captain and we were four points up in a Leinster Final with five minutes to go against Kilkenny. They come back to draw and beat us in a replay and strolled to an All-Ireland really by hammering Antrim and beating Galway well.
“We were always very competitive but if we had won one I think there might have been another couple there. I do regret we didn't make the breakthrough a bit quicker.”
Dempsey was speaking on the back of being inducted into the Gaelic Writers’ Association’s Hall of Fame last Friday night, with the awards scheme supported by the Dalata Hotel Group, and voiced his frustration at the fact that interaction between inter-county players and media is minimal nowadays.
“I think it's wrong. I know in my time that bit of profile was important and the national media would have given us a lot by coming down to do an interview and you'd be on the local paper regularly too.
“Believe it or not, it didn't do us any harm in life. If you were going for a job and you were known to play a bit of sport it didn't do you any harm in an interview. Obviously you had to be able to perform in your job, but it helped to have a profile.
“I think we've lost the run of ourselves a little bit. In my day there was great player accessibility. I think removing access to the players for the media isn't good for them, the media, or a county's supporters who want to know a bit about the players.
“I remember Liam Griffin telling us to go and embrace talking to the media and enjoy it. Do an interview but build up the opposition and don't say anything stupid.
“You'd get programmes years ago at county finals and there would be all sorts of Question and Answer interviews with players about their sporting heroes and favourite food and all the rest and everybody used to love that. That just seems to be gone now.
“I think it's robbing the character from the game in some way and I don't see much of a reason for it.”
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