While witnessing new rugby heroes lift and warm the hearts of the nation this chilly spring, we couldn’t but think of past ones and how this was their achievement too, writes  Kieran Shannon.

In almost any other sport or competition, it would be anathema to a type of observer, especially Real Championship Man: The wretched dead rubber.

It should go down as the Game That Never Was. As if no one ever paid or made their way through the turnstiles to watch it; as if no one ever played that Saturday evening; as if, for that moment in time, it didn’t seem to make the rest of the world fade into irrelevance, rather than the world soon after reducing that game to an irrelevance, writes Kieran Shannon.

In Tralee last Saturday night, all of the clichés that make up much of basketball’s great lure and lore applied. They were hanging from the rafters. The players could smell the popcorn. The place was hoppin’.

While most of the talk around the new-look hurling championship has been how it will severely test the depth and durability of each panel, Walsh Park’s hosting of Kilkenny at the weekend brought to light how it’ll test the suitability of certain provincial grounds as well.

The GAA needs to acknowledge that, along with its much-heralded community and amateur status, there is a pervasive cynicism that is ‘unique to our games’, writes Kieran Shannon

There is no other team sport that is more reliant on one position consistently throughout a contest as a gridiron team is on its quarterback writes Kieran Shannon.

In hurling, there is no longer a Kilkenny that bestrides the narrow world like a colossus but in football there is.

Why has it been another winter of discontent? asks Kieran Shannon