‘I actually think there is more in us, lots more’ – Oisín McConville hails his Wicklow troops after Westmeath upset

Division 3 league winners Westmeath were hot favourites to beat the Garden County footballers in Portlaoise, but a week after seeing off Down in their league final in Croke Park, Dessie Dolan’s men suffered a surprise 2-9 to 1-11 defeat.

It also means that Westmeath’s hopes of playing in this year’s All-Ireland championship have suffered a setback as Kildare will gain that spot if they beat Wicklow next Sunday and follow up with victory over Louth or Wexford in a Leinster semi-final.

Wicklow, however, will fancy their chances of another upset with jubilant manager Oisín McConville lavishing praise on his players’ determination.

“When you ask players what they want from their football career, they want to be able to look at each other and say we gave absolutely everything. And, in fairness, they gave absolutely everything today,” said McConville.

“It is (sweet). It has been a tough season and we found results very hard to come by, but I think towards the end of the league our performances improved, especially in the last two games.

“If you’re talking about how I would describe this team in the 18 months I’ve known them, it’s that they’ll go to the wall, they’ll go through the wire, but we probably haven’t seen enough of that to be honest. But we saw it today.”

The Wicklow manager thinks there’s plenty more in his team.

“I actually think there is more in us, lots more,” he said. “We were missing Mal (Malachy Stone, red card against Antrim), Paddy (O’Keane) went off (injured), Tom Moran black car, that’s three of our mainstays of our defence all year, so when things were going against us we dug in. I thought the bench gave us a major dig out today and again that probably hasn’t happened enough all year.

“There are so many things to like about today’s performance.

“Now, that needs to happen every day, but today is a start, Today is a benchmark. We can’t go below that now. We know what the next task at hand is. We’re overjoyed today, but we want to be overjoyed against next week.

“We played Kildare last year. We felt as if we competed ok against them, but we were beaten by 10 points and we want to change that now. This year we want to see it out until the end.

“And that was the big thing about today, we seen it out until the end,” he added.