Off-Broadway last Sunday, the Wexford footballers produced a moment of pure theatre to propel themselves towards the big leagues for the first time in over a decade.
The Model County needed to beat Westmeath in a winner-takes-all Division Three promotion showdown at Wexford Park. Westmeath led by two points with only seconds remaining when one last-gasp Wexford raid ended with a season-defining Seán Ryan goal. Pandemonium.
“It was one of the most thrilling moments I’ve had in Wexford jersey over all the years,” says team captain Eoghan Nolan.
“We’ve probably been on the receiving end of conceding a couple of last-minute goals over the years so you would always kind of think to yourself, ‘When will it be our turn?’ So what a time to do it at home and in front of a big crowd, it was brilliant.”
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The victory secures Wexford Division Two league football next season – the first time the county will have played at that level since 2013.
It has also earned them a Division Three final at Croke Park on Saturday, where they will face Down at 7.15pm.
Nolan, 31, is one of the longest-serving players in the Wexford dressingroom, having made his debut in 2014. The chance to play Division Two football has been a long time coming. Because, after jumping between Division Three and Division Four for a couple of seasons, Wexford eventually slumped to a difficult spell of spending seven years in the basement division.
They finally cracked the code in 2025 to emerge from Division Four, and John Hegarty’s side have now secured back-to-back promotions.
“Outside our group we were all fairly confident of our ability,” adds Nolan in relation to securing consecutive promotions.
“We had seen other teams who had done it [back-to-back promotions], like Louth, Limerick, Derry.
“The big thing for us last year was to get out of Division Four and get some consistency. We brought that consistency to this season, and the Down game at home was probably the only game we felt that we weren’t at our best or we weren’t the better team of the two.
“We always found it hard to get that balance of consistency in Division Four, it is tough down there but I think probably a big thing that eventually helped us was keeping the majority of the same players together.”
Over the last three years, Wexford have played 21 regular season league games – winning 17 and losing only four (to Laois and Leitrim in 2024, and to Limerick and Down this year).
Indeed, Wexford were only denied promotion from Division Four in 2024 on the head-to-head metric against Leitrim.
“Keeping that group together and keeping the back room team together has allowed us to develop that consistency where in previous years we might have had a manager for a year or two and when you finally felt you were building something maybe that would kind of be disrupted then with somebody else coming, so it has been good to have the same management and players.”
But it might not have been the case, truth be told. At the end of his second year at the helm, Hegarty wondered if he was the right man to drive the team forward.
“A crew of us went together and we sat down with John and said we want this to keep on continuing. Since then we’ve gone up from Division Four to Three and now Three to Two, so it was a great decision now looking back on it.
“As players we fully respect the management and we’ve loved everything that’s gone on there the last couple years, we’re enjoying it so much.”
This is Nolan’s 13th season involved with Wexford and on Saturday he will get the honour of leading his county out at Croke Park. And while the main target for the league has been achieved, Nolan would love the opportunity to lift a trophy at GAA headquarters.
Having won all seven group games last season, Wexford lost the Division Four final to Limerick.
“I’ve been there 13 seasons and I don’t have any silverware so just getting a bit of silverware [against Limerick last year] would have been something that would have been unbelievable.
“Obviously, our main target at the start of the year is you’re wanting to get promoted so it would have been a bonus, but look, unfortunately we didn’t get there.”
There is perhaps more on the line this year, though, given the purgatory of teams in the realm somewhere between the Sam Maguire and Tailteann Cup competitions.
Down will enter the fixture as favourites – the Mourne Men beat Wexford 1-29 to 1-19 when the sides met in February.
“Down were very good on the day but I think it’s probably the most we’ve learned from any game in a long time,” says Nolan.
“I think last year against Limerick was the first time for a lot of our lads to play at Croke Park, so look, we probably felt we didn’t perform well in that league final.
- “We actually played Fermanagh too there last year [in the Tailteann Cup] and we didn’t perform on that occasion either, so for a lot of our young lads they’ve got experience in Croke Park so it’s actually about getting a performance there now this weekend.”
