Denis Glennon has called on his Westmeath team-mates to rekindle the spirit of 2004 when the Lake County won its first Leinster football title. The Tyrrellspass sharpshooter was only 19 when he featured at full forward in that historic success, and while Westmeath haven't quite scaled the same heights since, he feels they are not far away from doing so. "Having won Leinster, I kind of thought, 'is this the norm, could it happen every year' - because it seemed like a relatively young team," he recalled. "Then a lot of the lads left the panel. It seemed like they were happy to get the medal, while the rest of us struggled to make the same impact. But we have been in two All-Ireland quarter-finals and we are the only team to beat Dublin in Leinster in the last five years. A lot of people don't give Westmeath credit for that. They underestimate what we have achieved, even in the years we haven't won Leinster. Glennon, who will once again wear the number 14 jersey against Wicklow on Sunday, attributes Westmeath's disastrous NFL Division 1 campaign to the injury crisis which left them without a host of first-team regulars. "Apart from Dessie Dolan (who continues to be troubled with a knee injury), Martin Flanagan and Michael Ennis are only coming back from injuries and Damien Healy was abroad. These are all players who were regulars last year and were missing. There were new players brought in and they were all trying to impress, but it doesn't happen straight away. It takes time for a team to gel." He continued: "Tyrone got a very late goal in injury-time and it was much the same with Galway. "We were ahead of them the whole game and they got a very soft goal - we could have won those games, but were missing seven regulars. We are getting players back now that we hadn't got in the league. "You'd never know, maybe in the long run if we can get over this game and get Dessie back and Martin Flanagan fit, I think we could give it a good run." Tweet

Most Read Stories