Kieran Shannon reflects on the ever growing importance of the Relative Age Effect in  underage sport.

With all the attention the various awards and big-name autobiographies command at this time of year, that little gem of a read for that special GAA person in your life can remain hidden, lost in the heap, writes Kieran Shannon.

The setting was the wine lands of South Africa, the sport rugby, but it could just as easily have applied to soccer in Manchester and Ireland, or to Gaelic football, especially in Ulster.

Dillon remained underrated both inside and outside his own county, right up until he announced his retirement yesterday morning, writes Kieran Shannon

A couple of months after Martin O’Neill took a sabbatical from football management to help look after his then ill wife Geraldine, this writer interviewed someone who had played minor inter-county Gaelic football with one of O’Neill’s great foot soldiers at Parkhead, Neil Lennon.

For a media working off morsels to understand what really makes Jim Gavin tick, his keynote presentation at the HPX High Performance Conference back in October, when everyone from Maslow to Mandela to MLK got a mention, was rightly considered revelatory.