Last week Setanta Ireland ran a promo for their coverage of tonight’s action at Croke Park that featured Kieran Donaghy and Alan Brogan musing gravely on their first meeting since last September’s All-Ireland final.

PERHAPS in time we might come to view last Sunday’s breakthrough by Dublin as a defining day in the history of the GAA’s most fabled rivalry.

Players don’t inhabit their traditions and heritage as much as we would like to think. It’s all about the here and now when you’re preparing for an All Ireland final

WHEN asked his opinion of the Giant’s Causeway the 18th century English poet and critic Samuel Johnson said that it was worth seeing but not worth going to see.

MUCH like the Limerick game at this stage last year, this evening’s All-Ireland Football Qualifier against Down is a dangerous curve ball to be thrown at Conor Counihan and his charges.

IT’S been a bizarre week in the weird and wonderful world of GAA with the RTE staff deployment coming in for careful scrutiny, the use of social media such as Twitter rendering us all aflutter and then Waterford GAA secretary Tim O Keeffe advocating the introduction of a two tier system in football a few short years after many of the counties trying to make the breakthrough, including Waterford, railed against the notion of being consigned to the now defunct Tommy Murphy Cup based on their standing in the football hierarchy.

PERFORMANCES and results... the new mantras of the GAA world assail the ear as if the top coaches in the game have now ransacked the language of the market. How many times since the championship started, only a few short weeks ago, have we heard the managers’ cant of asking their team for a performance and expecting the scoreboard to “look after itself”?

THERE are few things in life less likely to set the pulse racing and the nerves jangling than the first round of the Munster football championship.

THIS, we are told is good for the GAA. The goose that lays the golden egg versus the All-Ireland and League champions.

ANOTHER Allianz Football league practically over, and what have we learned?