Westmeath's All-Star goalkeeper Gary Connaughton is talking up Dublin ahead of Sunday's Leinster SFC semi-final, insisting they were "very impressive" in their first round win over Meath. Not many would agree with him after the Dubs almost paid the price for shooting 17 wides against a very average Meath team, but Connaughton knows that if they had converted even half of those chances, they would have won convincingly. "Dublin were very impressive. It was their first championship game of the year. I always believed they were going to beat Meath anyway," he said. "Last year they played Louth in the first round and absolutely hammered them. They only won by a couple of points in the end this time and Meath always have had good teams and it doesn't matter who they are playing they are always a tough dogged side. Dublin had a few scoring chances but didn't take them but they were a far better team that day. They will be looking to improve on that performance again. "We are under no illusions as to the size of the task we have. Dublin are a very ambitious team and they have players there that want to win an All-Ireland and players like Ciaran Whelan and those are hanging in there over the last few years determined to win an All-Ireland and we know we are up against it. The performance we put up against Wicklow certainly wouldn't beat the Dubs at the moment. Hopefully we can improve on that performance." The Lake County came within a whisker of beating the Dubs in last year's corresponding game, but they have failed to repeat that form so far this year. "Certainly, we will have to look at last year and bring that into our performance. Morale victories are no good to us anymore. We got a lot of stick after the Wicklow game. The pundits and RTE were giving us criticism and fair enough we didn't perform well, we just got through it but it wasn't a great performance," the Tubberclair man added. Tweet

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