Limerick weren't just playing a match last Sunday in Cork - they were playing a role. This is how the best champions behave first day out and have done since time immemorial

In their fifth season on the road as a successful combination Limerick are more vulnerable than previously to injuries, metal fatigue, events

Encouraging as it would be for Waterford to win, it would be even more encouraging for them to do so minus the services of Austin Gleeson.

We live in an age of impossibly sophisticated recovery regimens and backroom teams whose dimensions border on the size of a Cecil B De Mille cast. Whoever reaches the final and whatever the outcome, the winners and the losers will be hopping off the ground two weeks later. Rested, recovered, hydrated, the works. Not just fit but match-sharp, their sights calibrated, their stickwork oiled to a fetching gloss.

Gold Cup winner ridden by some girl. Big deal. You’d swear a woman had never won the Gold Cup before. It’s hardly going to make tomorrow’s front pages. 

So adios, then, Marcelo Bielsa. Isaac Newton was right. In the end gravity will always make the apple fall and bonk you on the head.

Maybe we should stop the hurling year now. Quit while we’re ahead. A first All-Ireland club senior title for Waterford. A first All-Ireland club intermediate title for Kildare.

Because most of John Kiely’s troops are in the sweet spot agewise, may they – a jarring thought for the pack – get even better before the onset of rust?

What casket of delights awaits in 2022 is a question to be answered in the general rather than in the personal because nobody ever gets everything they want from the sporting year. Nobody ever gets even the half of it

The longer 1951 remains the date of their last All Ireland triumph, the more their story cuts right to the heart of the questions that still matter in sport. Is it the outcome or the struggle, the destination or the journey?