Dolan blasts referee after cynical foul on Wallace

Westmeath senior football manager Dessie Dolan was unimpressed with the performance of Fermanagh referee Niall Cullen in Sunday's big game and felt a cynical foul on Ronan Wallace in the first half was not adequately punished.

Westmeath had earlier lost Ronan O'Toole to a black card and Dolan approached the referee at half-time to question the Wallace incident.

"There was no issue; I just wanted clarification," explained Dolan.

The manager was not enthused with the response he received. "I wouldn’t say it was convincing, his answer to me – let’s put it like that. He didn’t seem to know himself," said Dolan, who bemoaned a lack of consistency among referees at the top level.

"I’ll tell you one thing about referees that we find anyway, in a lot of these games we seem to be the ones that you’d be head-scratching and wondering where the free was," he observed.

"I’ll give an example: last week against Armagh, they got a shot away, Jason Daly saved it and we were coming out with the ball and it’s a free in. And it’s a prime example of where you can’t see a free. I think today you’d be scratching your head with some of the decisions the referee gave,” he added. It’s just very frustrating that we seem to be the team that doesn’t get the decisions in this series, and the local (media) here who are at the games, I’d say they feel the same."

Dolan expressed great pride in his side's overall performance and vowed they'll be fully focused on achieving victory in the final group game against Derry, who like Westmeath are chasing their first win of the campaign. It is now a winner takes all affair.

"We just got caught with that stray cross-field ball and those are the fine margins at this level, but I'm very proud of the players, it was a very good performance. It's a tough environment in that we get nothing from such a huge effort and we will now have to process this and look at the game against Derry in two weeks' time," he remarked.