Local derby with Longford sure to test footballers next Sunday
In bygone days, when both Meath and Offaly football was a lot stronger at senior level than it is today, Royal and Faithful teams tended to have our measure in competitive fare, but one could always guarantee that games against Longford, our only other Leinster neighbour, would be ding-dong affairs.
Next Sunday’s eagerly-awaited National League clash in TEG Cusack Park falls into that category also, with the additional spice in 2022 coming from the fact that the same venue will host the same two teams in the Leinster SFC quarter-final just ten weeks later.
Former St Loman’s, Mullingar player Billy O’Loughlin has – tongue-in-cheek one suspects – put on record that his focus as the new Longford manager will be entirely on the league with the Leinster championship labelled as “a dead duck”. That allegedly deceased duck may well have got a blast of a defibrillator with the very patchy form shown by Dublin so far this year, and regardless of the fact that the Delaney Cup may now be actually winnable in 2022 for the ten other participating counties for the first time in well over a decade, O’Loughlin is sure to be relishing the May 1 game in Mullingar which could well test the capacity of Westmeath’s county grounds.
However, in the next five days, it will be Sunday’s league encounter which will occupy his thoughts and that of his opposing bainisteoir Jack Cooney. The Coralstown/Kinnegad man’s troops sit proudly as joint-leaders of Division 3 with Limerick, both having won their opening brace of games and with an identical scoring difference, whereas the blue and gold-clad outfit have just one point to show from their opening two fixtures. It goes without saying that they will be ravenous for league points when they make the short journey south-eastwards and will need very little firing-up from O’Loughlin in the TEG Cusack Park dressing room (how great it is to see them operational again) at 1.45pm on Sunday.
The men in maroon and white will be expected by most observers to win the local derby, but favouritism and form invariably go out the door in this particular match. Cooney’s charges will need to avoid the dreadful start they got in their previous home game (against Wicklow) and focus for the entire 70 minutes-plus if they are to secure a hat-trick of victories in this competitive division. A win in Portlaoise was a significant scalp and they are certainly capable of garnering a third successive victory.
With the league for many years organised on a geographical basis, it is no surprise that Longford have been our most frequent opponents. A whopping 39 clashes have seen Westmeath winning on 20 occasions, Longford victorious 17 times, with two games drawn. The six very closely-contested league games played this millennium have resulted in three wins apiece:
20/4/2003, Roscommon, Westmeath 1-16, Longford 2-12
8/2/2004, Cusack Park, Longford 2-12, Westmeath 1-13
10/2/2013, Longford, Westmeath 2-7, Longford 1-8
3/4/2016, Longford, Longford 0-13, Westmeath 0-11
18/3/2018, Longford, Longford 1-16, Westmeath 1-12
24/3/2019, TEG Cusack Park, Westmeath 1-14, Longford 1-10
The details of the most recent game were as follows:
Scorers – Westmeath: G Egan 0-9 (7f), R O’Toole 1-2, J Heslin 0-3. Longford: M Quinn 1-0, D Mimnagh 0-3, D Gallagher 0-2 (2f), P Collum (f), D McElligott (f), D Quinn, P Lynn and D Doherty 0-1 each.
Westmeath: Eoin Carberry; Killian Daly, Ronan Wallace, Boidu Sayeh; Kevin Maguire, Frank Boyle, James Dolan; Sam Duncan, Denis Corroon; Jamie Gonoud, John Heslin, Jack Smith; Ronan O’Toole, Kieran Martin, Ger Egan. Subs used: Noel Mulligan for Gonoud (inj., 52), Tommy McDaniel for Smith (67), Noel O’Reilly for Daly (inj., 70).
Longford: Paddy Collum; Patrick Fox, Andrew Farrell, Barry O’Farrell; Barry McKeon, Donal McElligott, Darren Quinn; Darren Gallagher, Michael Quinn; Peter Lynn, James McGivney, Daniel Mimnagh; Darragh Doherty, Connor Berry, Liam Connerton. Subs used: Joseph Hagan for Doherty (44), Nigel Rabbitt for Connerton (57), Mark Hughes for Lynn (66).
Our senior hurlers have a free weekend competitively and I suspect they will be glad of it. As yours truly has often stated in print, and always sincerely says in a social context, inter-county players are amateur. Accordingly, they don’t deserve to be slated from the rooftops and especially by anonymous ‘keyboard warriors’.
However, finding positives from last Sunday’s dismal afternoon in Carlow is difficult. Two lightning quick post-match chats with others present in Netwatch Cullen Park – understandably, none of us fancied hanging around – generated immediate responses of “an atrocious effort” and “the worst in years”. And these are diehard people who gave up their Sunday and spent hard-earned money to travel to the Barrowside venue and are, therefore, well entitled to have been frustrated.
My on-air line as a Midlands Radio 3 co-commentator with Gerry Russell, “I haven’t a lot of hair left, but I am tearing out the few hairs that I have”, needs no embellishment. My off-air line, and now in print, “the slaughterings we will get in the Leinster championship if we play like this will break all-time records”, wasn’t an exaggeration. And then the result comes in from Walsh Park – and ‘only’ in the league – where Laois, who generally have our measure, were utterly hammered by Waterford, and the mind boggles even more.
All we can hope is that last Sunday was a one-off aberration and that the soul-searching which Joe Fortune spoke of after the game will propel a talented bunch of hurlers to dig deep for what now look like three very tricky assignments in the weeks ahead.