IT was the sort of start that the new Dublin camp had been so eager to achieve, but afterwards the mood of quiet satisfaction with a deserved 10 point winning margin, was clearly tempered with the knowledge that this was a soft beginning to what promises to be a long, hard summer if they are to go all the way again.

One man who made it to championship deciders on three occasions with Dublin was already packing his bags for this season yesterday. Barney Rock had seen his side overrun for most of a match which had ended as a contest early on and his last task of the current campaign was to shake some hands and send his old county on down the road with his best wishes.

It was, he said afterwards, "the only strange part," for, while the two sides were on the pitch there were no divided loyalties. At the end, though, the scoreline made grim reading but Rock felt that "you'd come away from that match a lot more hopeful than you would have last year against Wicklow." There is, however, still a considerable way to go.

"It's a young team and if they learned from that match then the defeat will have been worth it. We had enough chances, but by far the best team won in the end. There were clear differences in class between the teams and just looking at one aspect of the game, every time we tried to run the hall through the centre you'd find some Dublin player getting a hand on it. Then, instead of us scoring, they ran up the pitch and scored."

A match to reflect on and draw from for the future then, rather than one to pick over for flaws and if the Westmeath manager had one regret about the proceedings, it was that referee Noel Cooney had decided to send Keith Barr off towards the end of a generally trouble tree encounter.

"I'm sad that the referee sent Keith off because it wasn't a dirty game and it wasn't even a bad challenge. By that time the game was over anyway so it was a pity."

Cooney would say nothing of the incident afterwards while Barr himself declined to get into pleading his innocence, remarking simply: "The referee made his decision and that's the way it goes," before adding that "the Leinster Council will see the video," but his manager did feel that the player had been somewhat poorly treated.

"I thought it was very harsh, very harsh," said Mickey Whelan. "I tell my players to ignore referees, to play around them and just get on with things, but I think in this ease he was just very unlucky."

On the whole, though, there was plenty to be optimistic about, albeit cautiously and Whelan was generous in his praise of Dublin's defence, while still seeing room for particular improvement at the other end of the pitch.

"I thought the defence was excellent, the half back line were superb. We should have put away a few more points though. We let them off a bit and I didn't like that. I never relax. When you get a guy down, you should keep him there. The problem was that there was overpassing of the ball when there were scoring chances on."

All told, however, this was a solid win against fairly poor opposition and the Dublin boss was the first one to admit it: "I wouldn't read anything into that. Westmeath are only a young team. They are still coming and the margin doesn't mean anything against a side like that."

One factor that the young Westmeath players failed to cope with was the strength of Brian Stynes in midfield and afterwards he was pleased with the way the first outing of the campaign had gone.

We started off a hit slow and it took us a bit of a while to get control, but once we did our fitness and strength was too much for them," said Stynes.