By Kevin Egan

Two roads diverging, and all that. It was Friday evening when news broke of former Down goalkeeper Charlie Smyth signing a professional contract with the New Orleans Saints.

24 hours later, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, America’s loss was Wicklow’s gain, just in time for the start of the 2024 Leinster senior football championship. Mark Jackson, who along with Smyth and Monaghan’s Rory Beggan, competed for an American Football career via the International Player Pathway, was back in Wicklow, training with Oisín McConville’s side in advance of this Sunday’s game in Portlaoise.

“(Mark) was back at our training last Saturday, it was great to have him back around the group and he was kicking as well as ever” confirmed full forward Kevin Quinn.

“It has been great to have him training. We’ve all be keeping an eye on how he was getting on in America. Everybody in the group is 100 per cent supportive of him, we were watching the Combine and he has been doing us proud. He brings a great amount to the group so it has been brilliant to have him back involved this week, even of course we would have been delighted for him if he had got a contract”.

There’s no doubt that Jackson’s loss was felt during what was an incredibly difficult league campaign for the Garden County. They endured a run of five successive defeats, culminating in a 20-point defeat in Tullamore, before a home win over Limerick set up a final-day showdown with Antrim in Belfast.

“We definitely left points behind us” Quinn admitted ruefully. He cited the Down game on the opening weekend as a real swing moment, as well as their failure to finish well against Westmeath.

“We found ourselves in trouble, it came down to the last day against Antrim and it didn’t go our way either. We lost by three, if we would have won that we would have stayed up. We did show what we can do in patches, we just need that bit of consistency in our performances.

“I think in the week leading up to Limerick, the training and our mindset seemed to kind of switch” he observed.

“I think there was definitely a turning point. The training got a lot better and we gave ourselves as much of a chance as we could to stay up but it just didn’t really go our way. I think hopefully we can take the improvement from the last couple of games in the league and bring that into the Championship. Training has been much better and we’re starting to play better”.

Quinn was tuned into TG4 last Saturday night to check out their opponents this Sunday in Portlaoise, and he was impressed by what he saw in their 2-10 to 0-13 win over Down.

“Down are a very good running team. Westmeath set up traps and Down fell into them. We’re going to have to mix up our play as much as we can to avoid that, and we obviously know they have big players, the likes of [Ronan] O’Toole and Ray Connellan in midfield, so we’ll have to nullify them as much as we can and hopefully just impose our game as much as we can as well”.

“We’re going there on Sunday to get a result” he asserted.

“We’re not going there for anything less. We obviously know how good Westmeath are and we’ll give them their respect, but we’re going there for a win and hopefully there’ll be a crowd that’ll get behind us as well. When we play our game we are very difficult to break down.

“We’re a very young team so it’ll be a lot of lads’ first Championship game. Hopefully they’ll get into it nice and early and we all know what’s at stake. The winners play Kildare and we had a crack at them last year and we weren’t too far off, so it’d be nice to get them again”.

Westmeath versus Wicklow throws in at 3.30pm on Sunday April 7 at Laois Hire O’Moore Park, Portlaoise. For ticket information, see https://www.gaa.ie/tickets/where-to-buy.