If you thought your eyes and ears deceived you last week, you wouldn’t be alone. Aogán Ó Fearghail and Páraic Duffy endorsing more championship matches? 

They’re an obstinate bunch, Tipperary football folk. Small in number but big in pretty much everything else — it took three pleas from the PA announcer in Croke Park to convince them to leave the stadium long after the players had retired to their dressing room.

At the end of last month, GAA president Aogán Ó Fearghail was asked if he was worried about the standard of games in the football championship this summer.

My, aren’t we a pious lot? Brian Gavin hadn’t brought proceedings to an end on Sunday when the “hurling correct brigade” were populating social media announcing Waterford’s defeat as a victory for the game.

In the gathering gloom last Saturday night, small groups of Donegal and Monaghan players congregated in the car park outside Kingspan Breffni Park to shoot the breeze. If Cavan town wasn’t such a traffic logjam, they may have gone separate ways earlier. Yet they seemed pleased to have the chance to chat.

God love Jarlath Burns for trying but in the wake of Louth manager Colin Kelly’s impassioned criticism of the six-day turnaround his team suffered on Saturday Burns’ attempt to justify it was never going to work.

Other than how referee John O’Brien could have got it so wrong on Saturday, the most pertinent question arising from the Christy Ring Cup final surrounded the role of HawkEye in Croke Park. 

Waterford manager Derek McGrath on his fears that his obsession with hurling is affecting his job, his relationship with Davy Fitzgerald and being perceived as a pariah of the game