At half-time, the Cork players and the match officials were left waiting for Clare for a number of minutes in the bitterly cold conditions. 

After 15 minutes, I looked at the scoreboard and it was five points each. It struck me as strange because Tipp had looked far the better team from the start.

Inside the white lines, Kilkenny do the simple things well. They no longer have the capabilities to blow inferior teams away, as they did in 2007/08. 

At this stage everyone knows what you get with Kilkenny. 

I wrote last Saturday that players are strongly motivated by comments which call their personal courage into question.