Over the weekend, Waterford confirmed their return to Division 1A of the Allianz Hurling League by beating Wexford. That comes despite a huge turnover of players in a short space of time.
Tonight on Off The Ball, manager Derek McGrath joined us on the line to give an insight into the work going on behind the scenes in bringing through a crop of talented young hurlers.
"What it is, is probably a combination of 2007 and 2008 All-Ireland De La Salle College in the team and the Waterford Colleges team of two years ago that won an All-Ireland colleges as well, with the minors as well," he said.
"You look at probably a mirror or reflected examples of things that happened in Limerick, for example, with three U21s. There's never a guarantee and there's still no guarantee for us that we have any type of success. We just made a decision to blood those guys. In the likes of Kilkenny, they probably have to give these guys more of an apprenticeship coming into the squad at 21 or 22."
McGrath also spoke about the need to give these players space off the field at that young age and also touched on the expectation levels on the team.
"The expectancy levels are probably lowered and in terms of media profile we were probably seen as a team in transition or team building. That's probably the reality still, so we'd expect to encounter bumps or hurdles on the way and we'd hope we'd overcome them fairly quickly," he said.
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