You gotta larf. The only other option is to cry, to look ahead to next summer’s World Cup with a knowing dread and to what will, on all recent form, be another public bout of self-flagellation on the part of the England football team, its supporters and a media that feeds off the national XI like a shoal of sharks.

Quick. Off the top of your head: which is the bigger game? Munster v Leinster tomorrow in the RaboDirect PRO12 at Thomond Park or Ireland’s November Series opener against Samoa at the Aviva Stadium.

We do like a gripe, us Irish.

Work yesterday, as it so often does in this business, involved a lot of footwork.

Try as we might, sport simply isn’t meant to be stripped of its capacity to toy with our emotions.

Saunter around Croke Park before throw-in on match day and you will invariably come across photographers and cameramen harvesting some of the tribal colour with shots of fans funnelling into GAA Headquarters.

Last week Donal Óg Cusack wrote a piece for the GAA’s website on the nature of the relationships between those responsible for what we see on the field of play and those whose job it is to record such events and anything which they may perceive to be of note either side of the week’s most important 70 minutes.

This isn’t an easy write for a guy who, as a kid, dreamed of playing in front of the Stretford End, but as the start to another Premier League season approaches it brings with it the realisation that there would be no better script than for Liverpool to return to the summit of the game.

Back in the mid-Noughties the Leinster Council of the GAA found itself drawn to Croke Park like a moth to an everlasting light bulb.

The Ashes doesn’t just ask that you set one five-day or two-week stint aside, it demands you ring-fence just under seven weeks of your life.