Hegarty has transformed Wexford league standing - next it's championship

Wexford manager John Hegarty. Pic: Inpho

The terms of reference were pretty clear when John Hegarty took the Wexford job at the end of 2022; get us out of Division 4.

After four seasons in the bottom tier, the only movement Wexford had made was downwards as they bottomed out with a sixth place finish in that 2022 campaign.

Tot up the wins for their four seasons in Division 4, after relegation in 2018, and it amounted to a paltry 10 from 24 games, a 41% win rate that pointed to a group with their boots stuck in quicksand.

Four League campaigns later, Hegarty has delivered on his brief, startlingly so. Saturday's Division 3 final will be his 30th league game as Wexford manager and the team's win percentage has mushroomed from the previous four seasons, to 69%. They've only lost seven times in that period and one of those was last year's Division 4 final.

In fact, in 2025 and 2026, no other manager across the four divisions has a League win rate to match Hegarty's with Wexford; 12 from 15 matches. Five of those wins came this season in the vastly more competitive Division 3.

"We wanted to win three games as quickly as possible because we felt three games would give you security in the division," said Hegarty of this season's approach, when speaking on The View. "Four games was something we targeted, just to try to get a bit of credibility and respectability in our performances. And we felt that if we won five, we'd get promoted."

Which is precisely how it turned out, even if it took Seán Ryan's dramatic buzzer beater goal against Westmeath last weekend to claim that fifth win and the Division 3 final place.

The thing is, Wexford need to reset their sights now. They've been a League team so far under Hegarty but the challenge now is for them to become a Championship team too. If they beat Down, as difficult as that will be, they will probably qualify to compete in the All-Ireland SFC for the first time under Hegarty.

And that'll be a giant step up for a county that has only won one Leinster championship game since he took over, lost all its Tailteann Cup games in 2024 and hasn't ever advanced beyond the quarter-final stage of the Tier 2 championship.

Then again, nobody gave Wexford much of a chance of even surviving in Division 3 this season after last year's promotion, let alone thriving.

"At the start of the year, we were favourites to go down," said Hegarty. "There was no game that we were favourites to win throughout the whole lot of it. Any of the bookies, any of the previews, they had us finishing either seventh or eighth in the table. But we would have felt that we were improving and that we were consistent."