A week is a long time in the microwaved hurling championship. A lot changed between the aftermath of Waterford's first and second Munster championship games.
The night of the Limerick game, Davy Fitz was lauded for his tactical insights in taking the allegedly invincible All-Ireland champions to the brink.
Seven days later, Clare had beaten Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds, stealing a march on the rest in the battle to make the top-three and re-casting Waterford's two-point defeat as a missed opportunity.
And then Waterford themselves put in a confused and abject display in a one-sided loss to Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
Davy cut a particularly morose figure in his post-match interview, unable to really muster a case for the defence.
Meanwhile, the paltry crowd from Waterford for both matches was taken as a decisive vote of no confidence in the team and where they're going.
The Déise hordes that stayed away can hardly lean on aristocratic confidence and claim they're waiting for bigger days later in the summer. This may well be it.
Davy wasn't about to berate them for their apathy, telling reporters this week that "we didn't give them any reason to come to Cork."
He was once more quick to rope the failures of 2022 into the narrative, noting "the Waterford supporters probably have their reasons over the last year or two that maybe they are not happy with different things, and that's fine."
After the loss to Kilkenny in the league, Fitzgerald's comments that "when I got this team they weren't in a good place" were interpreted by his critics as pre-emptive self-justification and presumably weren't well received on the Tipp sideline.
We weren't even in May and Waterford's championship campaign already looked doomed. They might have perked up after the Cork-Tipp draw, which means they may not be required to overhaul a prohibitive score difference to survive.
But the signs are not good. Their pedigree in the new-fangled Munster championship is distinctly flawed.
The county is evidently not coursing with belief. Drawing broad conclusions from the hurling league is a mug's game, but Waterford failed to register a win of note in that much-derided competition, only beating Antrim and Laois and not by all that much either.
There are no safety nets left this weekend as they 'host' (kind of) Clare in their temporary adopted stadium.
The team with the best record in the Munster round robin takes on the team with the worst.
In the three and a half campaigns played under the new format, Clare have nine wins from 14, plus one draw and four losses - a better record even than Limerick who have eight wins.
Waterford's record in round-robin games can be most kindly described as abysmal. Fourteen games and a whopping 12 defeats, including a few hammerings - home to Limerick 2019, away to Clare 2022, away to Cork the last day.
The only victory was a distinctly underwhelming four-point home win over a Tipp side last year, for whom that campaign was itself a write-off.
In mitigation, their 2018 draw with Tipperary in the inaugural round robin should have been a win, but for the infamous 'ghost goal', when the rustic technology of the naked eye should have been enough to tell all present that Tipp's hopeful punt into the square hadn't near crossed the line.
That was Derek McGrath's valedictory campaign, when an injury-ravaged Waterford side registered a draw and three losses. Lamentably, it is probably still their most respectable showing.
Quite why the round robin suits some teams more than others is a bit of a mystery.
Clare's John Conlon said this week that he felt the system "suits our type of player" and spoke about the boon of playing championship matches in Ennis, something long precluded under the traditional format. Cusack Park is renowned as the archetypal 'fortress', though it should be noted that Tipp have gone to Ennis and won twice in the past four years.
While Munster hurling is no Connacht SFC - where home disadvantage is now a longstanding phenomenon - home venue has proven only a modest plus until now, with 15 home wins, 12 away wins, and three draws since 2018 (excluding the various neutral venue matches).
The situation with Waterford's home venue hasn't been a help, no doubt, though their championship record in Walsh Park wasn't much to shout about either.
In sharp contrast to all this, in the last three seasons played under the old format, 2017 and the pandemic campaigns of 2020 and 2021, Waterford reached two All-Ireland finals and a semi-final.
Ahead of the Covid season, Noel Connors speculated that Waterford's underdog mindset was better suited to knockout championship.
"I think that knockout hurling suits the underdog because it's a one-off match," he told RTÉ Sport in 2020.
"Whereas if you're playing a number of matches in a league format, it’s generally the teams that are better balanced or more developed, in the sense that they might have 25 or 30 lads who can play any day. That suits them more.
"When you’re from a smaller county like Waterford, even though you have exceptional players, it can be tough playing four competitive matches in a short period of time… but it always suits the underdog because you’re playing one-off matches."
Three-time All-Star Connors sounded considerably more bullish then than he does now.
In the wake of the game in Cork, he was warning that Waterford could drift away from hurling's top table, if they're not careful. Connors told the Examiner that the county were now "light-years" behind Cork and Limerick at underage level.
Since the last All-Ireland under-21 win in 2016 - a team which contained the Bennetts, Austin Gleeson, Mikey Kearney and Patrick Curran - they have just one championship victory at the age-grade.
Once more, Fitzgerald faces his former friend and current foe on the line. The Davy-Lohan relationship has shown no signs of thawing, though the media have tired of the subject. Davy has spoken publicly of wishing a rapprochement. Lohan, on the other hand, has been magisterially indifferent about the whole thing.
But on the basis that Waterford fare better in do-or-die knockout, they should at least have a puncher's chance this weekend. The internal psychologists will no doubt be drumming into them that it's old-style knockout from now on. It's all on the line in Thurles.
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