Paul Sharry hopes Westmeath can keep their good form going against Carlow on Sunday.

As the Lake County prepare to open their Leinster SFC campaign against the Barrowsiders at Mullingar this weekend, their centre back reflects on what was a "very positive league campaign", despite the obvious disappointment of losing the Division Two final to Derry:

"It was severely disappointing to lose that day - a great chance to bring some silverware back to Westmeath, because there has been a big drought there for a long time now," the St Loman's clubman says in The Irish Times.

"But we had a very positive league campaign, tried to look at the positives, and would much rather lose a league final than the first round of the championship against Carlow. And we have looked at the mistakes we made against Derry, tried to rectify them.

"And only so many teams get to play in the league finals, with the bonus of an extra game, and a little higher intensity than the rest of the league games. All of that is just what you need before the start of the championship.

"The confidence was very low, seriously low [at the start of the year]. But thank God the guys that are there are a great bunch of guys, everyone stuck together. The whole team bonded a lot closer and with that bond, the game started to improve. We started to work an awful lot harder.

"My good friend John Heslin also came back from Australia and was a huge boost to the team. He brought a lot of his professional attitude from Australia into our team. We started to place a lot more demands on ourselves in training.

"With that training started to improve and when your training starts to improve, your games are going to start to improve and the wins started coming naturally enough." Tweet

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