Derek McGrath says a phone call from Kerry football manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice gave him a great lift after Waterford's crushing Munster SHC final loss to Tipperary.

The Deise boss cut a forlorn figure on the sideline as his side suffered a 21-point drubbing at the Gaelic Grounds two weeks ago.

But the support he received from Fitzmaurice and others helped him to overcome that disappointment as he revealed on WLR FM: "The amount of positivity I received personally after the Tipperary game was really heartening.

"I got a lovely call from Eamonn Fitzmaurice, I'd be friendly with Eamonn from college. It was just a lovely call from him reinforcing his own beliefs and what he's had to put up with down in Kerry which is probably 100 times the scale of what happens in Waterford based on the expectancy in Kerry each year.

"Things like that hearten you to keep going, to drive on and to realise that success doesn't happen in a straight line, I suppose."

McGrath expects his players to regroup for Sunday's All-Ireland SHC quarter-final against Wexford. 

"We have a very resilient group of lads. With any defeat of that nature, there's a process whereby the first person you look at is yourself. We do that as a management, the players look at themselves and then you park it immediately.

"If you wallow in it, it becomes worse and it becomes a post-mortem to the point where everything is dissected. The reality is some of our players just underperformed on the day and that can happen in any level of sport or walk of life. We're hopeful now that we can rectify those things and just work as hard as we have been working up to that.

"We don't think that there'll be any long-term effects from the nature of the defeat."

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