Hackett accepts relegation looks on the cards

Despite the promise shown in the unlucky one-point defeat in Navan eight days earlier, Westmeath's senior footballers suffered a big setback in their quest to avoid dropping down a division for the second year running, when they lost to Laois last Sunday. After the game, Westmeath team manager Brendan Hackett accepted that relegation "is going to be difficult to avoid". "I said it would take five points to stay up and you would have thought that (wins over) Tipperary and Laois and a point in one other game would have been what the target was, so having let that one slip today means it is going to be very difficult." The Monaghan man stated: "I'm very disappointed and we all are because when you score 3-8 you would expect to win most games, but when you concede 24 points it kind of tells you a big story. We just didn't apply enough pressure and that was the one thing we emphasised." Ironically, just two short years ago, Westmeath's mean defence was the talk of the country, while the forwards (even with the now-absent marquee duo of Dessie Dolan and Denis Glennon on board) struggled to score goals. In relation to the Lake County defence, Hackett reflected: "We have lost defenders like John Keane and Derek Heavin and they are two huge players. It sounds like a cliché at this stage but when you have a team that's been successful from 2004 until 2008, there was a spine of players that were in that team and they have gone and that is the bottom line. It's just going to take time to replace those players. I can understand when you have a team that are very successful, you keep playing the same players over and over and you don't introduce players. So what we probably have now in Westmeath is a generation of players in their late 20s and early 30s who have a lot of inter-county experience and then guys in their mid-20s that haven't played inter-county at all, and then you have 20-year-olds who are the next generation. The players that have come in lack the experience." One reporter asked bluntly as to whether some of the new panellists simply lacked the ability to perform at this level, but Hackett came up with a general answer. "It is going to take time to put a new team together. One team has just finished and the team that is going to replace it is not going to be built in six months. It is going to take at least a year to a year and a half. I think the encouraging signs are you will see a lot of the under-21s who will form the basis of the new team. There will probably be eight or nine of them come the championship." A few weeks since Steven McDonnell ran riot in Crossmaglen, Laois attacker Michael John Tierney similarly caused panic in the Westmeath rearguard whenever he got possession. When Hackett was asked about Tierney's solo show, he avoided the specifics of the corner-forward's 13-point haul. "You don't target one man and close him down, you have to close down the ball that is coming into him in the first place. Every time we fought back we just let them back into the game and that is due to lack of pressure. Every time we got scores we conceded scores too easily. It was almost like they got two scores for every one that we got. I would probably say we gave away the possession on at least 30 occasions. If you are giving away possession and you are not putting pressure on the opposition you are not going to win any match." Ironically, given Hackett's oft-expressed desire to build a team, 34-year-old Martin Flanagan returned to the maroon and white colours last Sunday. Brendan commented: "Martin was great and it was a case of any ball that went in he won, but it was the same in the first half, so did (Paul) Greville. We were winning ball every time it went into the full-forward line and we were getting scores, we just didn't get it in there enough. That is the waste of possession that I was talking about. There were times when it must have been very frustrating for supporters to see us coming up the field with the ball and then just give silly passes or making poor decisions. That is frustrating to watch for everybody and there was so much of it happening all over the place. We tried the changes but there were just so many people making basic errors and it was just frustrating."