Westmeath's Hope: John Heslin's Journey After Mayo's Breakthrough

John Heslin has watched Mayo rip up the script. Now he wants Westmeath to believe they can do the same.

As Andy Moran’s Mayo finally ended 75 years of anguish by lifting Sam Maguire, the Westmeath forward was listening on RTÉ Radio 1’s Inside Sport, not just as a pundit, but as a player whose own fire has been stoked all over again.

Mayo’s breakthrough, he argued, is bigger than one county.

“It kind of gives every other county that hope and as a sportsperson you just want to have that hope and that chance. The hunger is still there for sure,” said the 34-year-old, speaking alongside Brendan Devenney and Ciarán Whelan.

That word – hope – is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Westmeath these days.

No retirement, not yet

Heslin has already come back once. An initial inter-county retirement stretched to almost a year-and-a-half before he returned to the fold under Mark McHugh and helped drive Westmeath to a historic summer.

He has no intention of walking away again.

“(I’m) still a current Westmeath footballer anyway,” he said with a grin. “I was golfing with Mark McHugh a couple of weeks ago and he didn’t tell me to retire yet, so current for now.”

Current, and crucial. His return coincided with one of the great seasons in Westmeath’s history, a campaign in which they stopped being plucky participants and started writing their own headlines.

Mayo may have grabbed the national spotlight with Sam, but Westmeath quietly produced a year that altered how they see themselves.

Leinster glory – and a long shadow

The headline achievement was clear. Just the second Leinster title in the county’s history, secured with a gripping win over Dublin at Croke Park in May.

For Heslin, who had spent much of his career watching Dublin collect Leinster titles as a matter of routine, it was a deeply personal moment.

He had spoken before rejoining the panel about how special it would be for Westmeath to finally topple Dublin, while knowing it would sting for those who had fought through the blue wave without ever landing that punch.

“I would have been on record for saying previously that Dublin had won the Leinster Championship every year I had played football which was 14 seasons and I was just very lucky to come back and be part of that team,” he said.

It would have been easy to call that Leinster final his game of the year. Easy, but not quite honest.

“So I put that one aside to give the lads the full credit they deserve,” he added.

Because the match that really lodged in his mind came when he wasn’t even on the pitch.

Tullamore turning point

To find Heslin’s game of the year, you have to go back to Tullamore and a quarter-final that reshaped Westmeath’s sense of what was possible.

Westmeath 4-18, Meath 0-25. A scoreline that still jolts.

He was in the stands that day, not the dressing room. Watching, not directing. Just another supporter swept up in something unexpected and wild.

His recall afterwards, he joked, felt like “they were just taking a fan from the crowd”.

Westmeath arrived in Tullamore as “severe underdogs”, as he put it. Meath, with good reason at the time, were being talked up as one of the favourites for the Leinster Championship. The script said Westmeath would battle, then fade.

They tore that script up.

“We haven’t gotten over Meath too many times in the championship,” Heslin said. This one, then, carried extra weight. It wasn’t just a win; it was a statement.

What stayed with him most was the swagger of the younger brigade.

“The young lads for Westmeath that day were just unreal,” he said. “Some of the scores they got, Shane Corcoran scored a wonder goal, Matty Whittaker got a goal and then, his subsequent performances rightly so got (him) on the Sunday Game Team of the Year.”

Corcoran’s finish. Whittaker’s surge and strike. Score after score that suggested this was no fluke, no one-off ambush. It felt like the start of something.

“It was a very special victory in Tullamore for Westmeath that day and there was a sense on that day that this Westmeath team has something special in it.”

That sense has only grown.

A player and a fan

Heslin talks now with the split perspective of a man who has lived both sides of the white line. He watched that Meath game as a supporter, roaring them on. He celebrated the Dublin scalp and Leinster title as a player who had waited 14 seasons for that moment.

“So that for me will live long in my memory as a Westmeath fan, but obviously now still as a player as well,” he said.

Mayo have shown that long waits can end, that old stories can be rewritten. Westmeath, with their young guns and their veteran leader refusing to go quietly, have started to believe they might be next.