Pat Spillane hoping to help Sligo down the right road

As the football championship season begins its winding journey this weekend, newly crowned Division 4 champions Sligo find themselves eyeing up a very pronounced fork in the road.

Over the next few weeks, their entire season will dramatically diverge one way or the other with two very different destinations on offer.

Take the correct turn and Tony McEntee's side will be where they want to be – in the race for Sam Maguire and facing possible big day outings against the likes of Kerry and Dublin in the new round-robin format.

Get lost along the way by failing to make the Connacht final and it’s a second year in the Tailteann Cup. Not that they mean any disrespect to the second-tier competition, but one of Sligo, Leitrim, New York or London, who they face in Ruislip on Saturday, will be in the top 16 competition, and the Yeats County want to be the side that takes advantage of the group 1 or 2 All-Ireland seedings potentially on offer.

It could be argued that they would be better off missing out and instead challenging for a trophy that they would likely have a good shot of winning, but as attacking ace Pat Spillane Jnr explains, Sligo simply aren’t thinking that way.

"Playing at a higher standard, playing those top-quality teams is what brings on a team," he told RTÉ Sport.

"From a championship perspective, the opportunity to be going up against some of those top Division 1 teams would do so much for this group, particularly the young players. We’d look to embrace that battle."

Not that Spillane is jumping the gun, far from it. The 25-year-old, who has featured in all nine of Sligo’s games this year, saw enough in his first season with the team in 2022 to know that while the 'one game at a time’ mantra is a clichéd one, it’s