LOMAN’S HIT ALL THE RIGHT NOTES FOR DR JOHN

Westmeath talisman and homebird couldn’t be tempted by a career in the AFL or English soccer

‘LIKE SO MANY VERY GOOD PLAYERS, HE CAN BE A BIG CHALLENGE’

THE wonder of John Heslin is that his capacity to amaze never lets up.

This year’s jaw-dropping offering comes packaged in an 11.4 second YouTube video — the length of time it took for him to kill Tyrellspass before they even got a chance to draw breath in the Westmeath county final.

It’s worth checking out. It is of a genre that was only accessible from the pages of boy hero comics before the digital age.

He catches the throw-in, takes one bounce, one solo, lays it off and swallows ground with a couple of huge strides, before taking the return pass, allows for one more hop and send a dipping right-footed shot from 25 metres into the top right corner of the net.

It is reckoned to be the fastest goal ever scored in a county final at Cusack Park and most likely the best, too.

For all that, though, it will just have to find its place in the queue of gobsmacking moments which Heslin has churned out with such regularity that he has threatened to turn the extraordinary into the routine.

Where to start? Well, not only did he captain St Loman’s to a first county title in 50 years in 2013, but he took leadership to a whole new stratosphere.

When he scored the winning goal in the sixth minute of injury-time against Dessie Dolan’s Garrycastle in the semifinal, it took his personal tally to 2-16.

Not in a season, not in a month but in one game against opponents that had become the first Westmeath club to compete in an All-Ireland final the previous year.

As far as the county’s domestic records can stretch, there is nothing to contradict this as an all-time scoring feat. And if it is ever to be beaten, the odds suggest that he will shoot it down himself; something he made a decent fist of when he racked up 3-9 against The Downs just 12 months later.

But if it is not the numbers he has posted that impress, then it’s the one on his birth cert.

This is his ninth senior Championship campaign with Loman’s and he is just 25. In a time when the GAA did not legislate for kids leaping from the mini-blitzes into adult football in a blink of the eye, he made his Championship bow in 2009 at the age of 16.

He made such an impression — he came off the bench against Tyrellspass and won a crucial a penalty — that he would start (and finish) at midfield in that year’s county final.

He was a child pitched in against boyhood heroes like Rory O’Connell and David Shaughnessy and yet he never once blinked.

It is, perhaps, fortunate for Loman’s that he is in their side at all because circumstances and talent could have taken him anywhere.

He spent the first year of his life in the United States, and, after his parents moved back, the first year of his GAA life in an even more foreign environment when viewed through St Loman’s lenses, as he togged out with Mullingar Shamrocks.

He is master of all trades when it comes to sport. He hurled with Castletown Geoghegan and was signed up by soccer outfit Cherry Orchard which led to him sharing a Republic of Ireland Under-15 dressing room with the likes of Jeff Hendrick and Robbie Brady.

The pro game threw wolf-whistles at the beefy young striker as well and he went to Derby County as a 15-year-old, but packed it in after a week.

Even at that age, his heart and head were in perfect alignment and he recalled in an interview last year that he had an immediate moment of clarity sitting in his Derby digs. One question gnawed: ‘Would I rather score a goal for Derby County or score a goal against the Dubs into the Hill,’ he recalled.

It is that obsession with land — he is a farmer who after acquiring his PhD works for Teagasc — and community that has defined and guided him. When he was 19, the AFL came calling in the guise of the Richmond Tigers but the experience left him so cold, he was back home in Mullingar in a matter of months.

He had all kinds of reasons to come back — family, friends and education but what impressed most was how he articulated the most powerful pull of all.

‘You have to have heart and passion when playing sport and that’s what I had for the GAA. I always put my heart into everything I do but it just wasn’t there for AFL so I knew what I had to do.

‘It got to the stage where I couldn’t hold conversations with people, I didn’t want to talk about AFL; I wanted to talk about GAA. It’s always been my life and I like it being my life,’ he revealed in his first interview, when he returned at the start of 2012.

A decision to quit Down Under might be relatively easy for the likes of Dublin’s Ciarán Kilkenny, who rejected a professional AFL career for the same reason, but Heslin returned in the knowledge that as a Westmeath footballer, he would have to sustain himself on the crumbs that fall from the intercounty table.

Not only has that never mattered, it has never showed. Tom Cribbin managed Heslin for the past three years and it has left a lasting impression.

‘His attention to detail was just incredible, to the point that I can honestly say that in all my time in management I have never witnessed that to the same extent in any other player,’ says Cribbin (left).

It has showed too. Since making his debut in 2011, he has played 22 Championship games, racking up 3-108.

Of course, his role as a dead-ball specialist in part explains those numbers, but those figures don’t come close to explaining his true worth.

He is one of the most accomplished midfielders in the game, but Westmeath’s needs means that he is also deployed as a full-forward.

But left in his natural berth he is a match for the best, something Kerry experienced in a 2012 qualifier when the Lake County came up a point shy.

In Cribbin’s eyes, if the GAA was a borderless entity there is no team that Heslin would not find a starting berth in.

‘Without a shadow of a doubt he would make any team in the country, includ- ing Dublin and Kerry.

‘He is like all very good players in that they can be a challenge at times. He likes things done right. The big thing is that if he feels it is not being done right, he would say it straight to your face.

‘He sets very high standards for himself and he expected everyone else to meet those standards which I thought was a great thing for the group.’

Those standards continue to be a source of wonder.

Hours after he scored that goal against Tyrellspass, Westmeath chairman Seán Sheridan did a final tour of the Cusack Park before it was locked up and found one player still in the Loman’s dressing room.

‘It was John Heslin and he had a sweeping brush,

‘I said to him leave it, that there’d be men coming in the morning to clean up. But he said no, that this was the way he wanted it,’ recalled Sheridan.

That act has almost become a cliché for humility thanks to the All Blacks, but Heslin has proved time and again that his standards are not for show.

Moorefield should be braced for that truth today.