The day Glen Rovers buried the sliotar in Cashel

Sunday’s Munster club final is a novel pairing, Glen Rovers of Cork versus Ballyea of Clare, but the Glen have history at this level going back five decades, even if the game they played 50 years ago had a spicy backstory. We’ll come to that.

Denis Coughlan enjoyed a long and successful career with the Blackpool club and Cork, in football and hurling. He recalls the dawning of the provincial club championships as the beginning of a “real adventure”.

“It was a great development. You were going outside your county to play a real match, not a challenge, and you didn’t know who your opponents were a lot of the time, particularly in the early days, or how good they were.”