Yesterday in Nowlan Park reminded me of the Gaelic Grounds in 1993.

It’s funny how this whole thing works.

Before yesterday’s Munster hurling semi-final began, the mood and atmosphere around this Cork team reminded me of 2003, when they met Clare in Thurles.

To me, Derek McGrath has been manager of the year to date.

The Leinster Council have a lot to answer for.

When I stepped down from Dublin last September, I was barely back down the M7 when some people already thought I had relocated to Galway. 

I was in the RTÉ radio booth in the cockpit of the Kinnane Stand yesterday, when the fourth official signalled there would be just one minute of injury-time.

The day of a big championship game, a fair few of the Clare lads used to think I was on another planet, that I didn’t know what nerves were, that I was so relaxed I was nearly horizontal.

When Dublin won the league title in 2011, the final ended in pretty much the same manner as it did for Waterford yesterday; a big score, the game in the bag down the home straight, the option of emptying the bench was on the table. 

When we played Cork in the 1998 league semi-final, what I remember most is that we wore white togs and yellow socks. We had never worn white togs before in our lives, not even as minors. I don’t know where the yellow socks came out of it, they were dire. We were worse. We were cat.