Westmeath knew they were up against it as they travelled up to Croke Park to take on Dublin in the Leinster football final.
Naturally, manager Tom Cribbin reverted to a far more defensive approach to attempt to contain the Dubs.
While that restricted the opposition somewhat in a losing effort, Off The Ball's Colm Parkinson pointed out that they missed a trick with their attacking strategy.
"Blanket defences are so easy to coach - the defensive side of it. It's strength in numbers. When pundits call it good defending, it drives me up the wall. It's not necessarily. Westmeath have done it within two weeks and they've done it with forwards who aren't exactly natural defending forwards. So to do it with a hard working half-forward line staying back there, that's easy. And Westmeath proved it," he said, before highlighting the attacking side of deploying the blanket.
"The problem is the transition when you win the ball back. That's more difficult to coach that in two weeks. They left young Dempsey up in the forward line. He's fast but he's weak and the one thing about a blanket defence if you're leaving a forward or two up, they have to be special forwards. They either have to be a forward that's really strong like the Paddy McBrearty mould that can take on two men and put it over the bar, or they have to be really accurate. Westmeath had those two players in Martin and Heslin and they filtered them back. They left the wrong man up on his own. So, it didn't look to me like there was any thought put into the offensive side of the defensive game. It was more to do with stopping Dublin scoring."
Billy Joe Padden was also on tonight's show and he gave us his take on what he witnessed between Galway and Armagh, which saw the Tribsemen prevail in their qualifier clash.
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