Glennon: Lake lads haven’t gone away

WESTMEATH footballers haven’t gone away.

Ok, they haven’t gone anywhere near to reaching the dizzy heights of that first ever Leinster title five years ago, they have won a Division Two League title and have acquitted themselves well in good company.

To use his own words, flamboyant forward Denis Glennon says ‘they haven’t turned into a bad team overnight.’ The inclination might be to think so, to doubt that they have the potential to go places, most of all to believe they can do better than last season.

They lost by a mere two points to Dublin in the provincial semi-final and by just four points to Tyrone in the second round of the qualifiers (which proved a much more respectable showing than that from Dublin against the eventual champions at the quarter-final stage).

Mick O’Dwyer was with Laois when they lost the 2004 provincial decider and Iveragh native Tomás O Flatharta was one of Páidí O Sé’s selectors. On Sunday, the two Kerrymen will be on opposite sides when Westmeath face up to Wicklow in the Leinster quarter-final in Mullingar.

Glennon was only 19 when O Sé brought him into the squad in his first year in charge and had him at full-forward when they beat Dublin in the Leinster quarter-final for the first time since 1967, going on to beat Wexford and taking the title after a replay with Laois. “Having won, I kind of thought, ‘is this the norm, could it happen every year’ – because it seemed like a relatively young team,” he recalled.

“Then a lot of the lads left the panel. It seemed like they were happy to get the medal, while the rest of us struggled to make the same impact. But we have been in two All-Ireland quarter-finals and we are the only team to beat Dublin in Leinster in the last five years. A lot of people don’t give Westmeath credit for that. They under-estimate what we have achieved, even in the years we haven’t won Leinster.

One of the players who helped the team develop (after making Westmeath made a big impact under Luke Dempsey in the inaugural qualifier series in 2001) was Rory O’Connell, an outstanding midfielder in is prime but now well retired. Glennon points out that he played with him, as well as the player who has been making a name for himself in the position in recent times, David Duffy. And he believes Duffy could prove to be even better.

“That’s because he has all the attributes that a midfielder needs. He is big, strong and a very talented footballer as well. I can see him becoming one of the best midfielders in a matter of a few years.’’

He appreciates that expectations in the recent league might have been high after the quality of their play in the championship last year, maintaining that some questionable decisions – by the same referee in both of their defeats – worked against them.

However, he points out that performances suffered because of the simple fact that they ‘very unfortunate’ with injuries, with Dessie Dolan missing the entire campaign because of a knee problem which he has yet to recover from.

“Apart from Dessie, Martin Flanagan and Michael Ennis are only coming back from injuries and Damien Healy was abroad. These are all players who were regulars last year and were missing. There were new players brought in and they were all trying to impress, but it doesn’t happen straight away. It takes time for a team to gel!’

At the same time, he argues that too much shouldn’t be read into their League form, that the results hide the fact that they played quite well in a number of games. “Tyrone got a very late goal in injury time and it was much the same with Galway,” he points out.

“We were ahead of them the whole game and they got a very soft goal....We could have won those games, but were missing seven regulars. We are getting players back now that we hadn’t got in the League.

“You’d never know, maybe in the long run if we can get over this game and get Dessie back and Martin Flanagan fit, I think we could give it a good run.”