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?

IT has become almost axiomatic that the Cork senior football panel is by far the strongest in the country. We didn’t need them to win the league and championship double last year to inform us of that but there were signs right throughout last season that their cliché strength-in depth was being used to telling and tactical effect to swing matches their way in the last 10 or 15 minutes.

Luck is not chance, it’s toil; fortune’s expensive smile is earned.

KERRY football followers aren’t sure what to make of this year’s Allianz Football League.

ONCE more with no feeling for the game! The whole drama of any All Star announcement is often more about who is left out rather than who is left in but with yesterday’s announcement of the 2010 football selection (or football laugh-in depending on your opinion) should generate some high stool debate and a certain amount of trick question specials at table quizzes over the next few days and weeks.