Ho hum. This column has touched before on sport’s propensity to be sidetracked by events which have little or nothing to do with the events taking place inside the white lines, or whatever the equivalent parameters may be in the various codes that demand our attention, and here we are again.

Walk along any of London’s famous old shopping thoroughfares — your Oxford Streets, Covent Gardens and Sohos — and the same tacky souvenirs will festoon the windows and spill out onto the pavements.

My, but how the GAA has moved on.

For a good four days there, from Saturday morning through to Wednesday, the Facebook feed went unfed and unchecked, Twitter managed to survive without @Rackob and the internet lost a good few hundred page hits.

You’ll have seen the photo by now.

Huzzah for the boys from Longford. Huzzah!

No doubt you’ve heard by now that Wicked, the musical which tells the story of Oz from the witches’ perspective and one that has taken Broadway and the West End like a Kansas storm for the last 10 years, is coming to Dublin.

Like most sports journalists, this columnist served an apprenticeship that called for a frequent presence at games where press facilities amounted to a spot inside rather than outside the rails and the height of any literary ambition was being able to read your notes as the rain sent the ink trickling down the page.

When Ian Madigan was photographed staring at his mobile phone during yesterday’s Leinster training session in UCD it looked likely to be the ideal snap with which to accompany the inevitable raft of articles dedicated to his omission from the Ireland squad.

For 24 years, they’ve been funnelling through Annascaul and Lispole, some even over the Conor Pass, into west Kerry from all corners, drawn to the peninsula by the charisma of one man.