THERE are those who would suggest that recently-retired Kerry goalkeeper Diarmuid Murphy’s greatest achievement as a footballer was finding a way of changing his kick-out technique over the course of his last season in green and gold.

PERHAPS the most striking aspect of Cork’s opening National League win in Scotstown last weekend wasn’t that the meanest defence in the country conceded 3-12 but that all 3-13 of the Cork total came from open play.

IF Bertie Ahern is entitled to an artist’s exemption on the grounds that a certain amount of creative and imaginative toil went into the production of his biography, then surely the humble hack tasked with previewing the National League deserves similar treatment.

IN A truly fascinating essay published last month on the effect of Celtic Tiger affluence, Declan Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD, said that “things are often studied only when they start to go wrong. The end of things is the moment we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost”.

It may not be Friday the 13th, or Halloween, but what are the chances of Cork’s nemesis coming back to haunt them in Sunday’s All-Ireland final? asks Dara O Cinnéide

FOR Henry Ford, history was tradition and therefore “more or less bunk”.

DO NOT fear mistakes, there are none” – Miles Davis.

ON the morning of the Sanford Memorial at Saratoga on August 13, 1919, Willie Knapp, the jockey of the hundred-to-one-shot Upset, turned to trainer Jim Rowe and said, “You know, Mr Rowe, we got a chance to beat Man o’ War this afternoon.”

WHILE the rest of the GAA world had been concentrating on the puzzling volatility of Donegal football after defeat at home to Antrim only a few short weeks ago, John Joe Doherty was in the business of renewal and regeneration.

PERHAPS it is only fitting that Cork footballers are finally getting due recognition for being one of the most consistent and durable championship performers over the last number of years but there is a bothersome reality buried underneath all the hoopla that followed their semi-final demolition of Kerry.