In a week when the plight of the inter-county GAA player has been prominently described as "depressing", any conversation with an Irish Premier League basketball player is worth starting with asking what that experience is like, writes Kieran Shannon.

When reflecting the other day on the fact that we’ve just passed the halfway point of the football decade, the mind soon turned to the journey home from the heart-stopping, Croker-packed 2010 All-Ireland semi-final between Cork and Dublin.

After all the months hearing about them, reading about them and buying them, finally, over the last few days, we’re guessing you got round to actually reading some sports books.

Ten years ago he wouldn’t have been home for Christmas. Instead 23-year-old Chris Craig from Arizona was over here, playing with and coaching Kieran Donaghy and the Tralee Tigers. The National Cup semi-finals and final were in January and he had a team to prepare.

Even now in this country that he used to captain and manage with such pride, we still don’t or can’t give Mick McCarthy due credit.

Gary Keegan may have been talking about Irish Olympic sport in these pages a few days ago but what he said could apply to all of Irish sport.

A former boxing coach out in the Institute of Sport may be among the most invisible players in Irish sport, but he’s one of its most influential too, writes Kieran Shannon.

There goes another one, a forward that used to light it up but has now conceded that the game itself more than father time has dulled and worn him down.

The great Jack Kyle passed yesterday, aged 88, but what a full life he lived and he knew it.

IT would have been yesterday, a Monday in November, 94 years ago, that Luke O’Toole, the general secretary of the GAA, walked through the early-morning mist and the blood-stained, bullet-ridden grass of Croke Park, shadowed by a journalist.