“The sooner the public in Clare let that team play the way they should be playing, they have a chance of doing something,” Fitzgerald remarked.

“If they stay doing that stupid stuff of hitting the ball long all the time, they won’t win anything. They need to work the ball the way they were working it today.

"That is what works for that team. Myself and the lads, we wish Clare the best of luck. It is crucial to let that team play.

“The one thing I would urge, when the [Clare] boys run the ball, play it short and vary the game, they have a chance.

Just give the boys a chance and stop looking for them to hit it long all the time. Let them do what suits them. If you do that, you have a chance. If you hit it long all the time against Galway, you are going to be beaten.

Fitzgerald said the better team won this poorly attended quarter-final (only 10,255 showed up), but rued three consecutive wides and two missed goal chances when Wexford had the margin back to four late in the second-half.

“If we managed to score them two or three points when we got back into it, trust me, I don’t think we would have been beaten. We weren’t the better team.

"The better team should have been up a bit more. When we got the second goal chance and the few point-scoring opportunities, if we had taken them, it could have been an interesting finish. That didn’t happen.

“We knew Clare were going to use the crossfield ball, it was just hard to counteract it. They got some great scores, as well.

There was a period there where nothing was going right for us and I knew we had them rattled when we changed our shape.

"I left a lot of space between midfield and the full-forward line and I just tried to get the ball into space. We did get results from that. It was in that period that we got back into it.

"Clare are going to have to be mindful of that, they are going to have to plug the gap that they allowed us to develop in the second-half.”