Tom Cribbin wasn't making any excuses after Westmeath's 31-point mauling by Dublin.

The Lake County's decision to play an attacking game against the All-Ireland champions backfired badly as they suffered one of their heaviest ever championship losses.

"We were completely outclassed," the Westmeath manager is quoted as saying on gaa.ie.

"My gut feeling and heart before it was that the only hope you would have of beating Dublin is to lock down the show completely and try not to let the goals in. But people didn't want to see that, our players didn't want to see that. They felt they could have a go at them, but we were just outclassed."

Westmeath's lost virtually every one of their kickouts as goalkeeper Darren Quinn opted to kick the ball long.

"To have the pace to play them, we'd worked so hard on it, but we have been struggling of late there in that area," Cribbin said of his midfield.

"It's very difficult for the 'keeper, teams are learning how to play a zonal shape now in defence instead of man-marking and pushing lads up into squares like basketball and pushing extra bodies up. Teams of the calibre of Dublin are not afraid to push 12 lads up into that zone and it makes it very, very difficult unless you have an out-man. We just couldn't win it, we couldn't get our hands on it."

"We just weren't picking up the breaking balls either. We talked so much about how much we needed to win the breaking ball, but we just couldn't win it."

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