Some of these guys may take their emotional energy from the crowd so you’d wonder now will that have an effect on the big guns here like Patrick Horgan and Austin Gleeson?

I don’t want to be hammering lads but if you took Tony Kelly out of the team yesterday, Clare would have been whipped

The counter-argument is how much more difficult will it be to suppress emotion — all around the county — after a Munster final or All-Ireland win? I don’t see that being a problem.

The Rockies had a difficult start. They looked nervous early on. They shipped two goals. Then things changed

Joanne Cantwell asked me at one stage during commentary if I was whispering. I was just so conscious of the subs and the management teams below me hearing what I might be saying about them

In the second of a two-parter, Anthony Daly revists the Offaly trilogy of '98, the 'sit-in' and what haunts him most from a painful year.

In the first of a two-parter, Anthony Daly revisits the tumultuous and controversial hurling season of 1998

In July 2008, I was upstairs in my sports shop in Ennis looking for runners to put out on display when my phone beeped with notification of a voicemail. I didn’t recognise the number of the missed call but I dialled into my inbox.

Last autumn, I got a call from someone on the committee established to find the next Offaly hurling manager. The guy I spoke to was full of ambition and intent. They were only in the early stages of the process but he wanted to know if I’d be interested in speaking to them. I politely declined.

When Clarecastle met Newmarket-on-Fergus in the 1992 championship, we went into the game as raging hot favourites, not just because we were reigning county champions, but because of the way the modern tradition between the clubs had been emphatically turned on its head.