When it comes to appreciating the commitment of elite GAA players, their rugby counterparts are among their biggest admirers.

He says he has no interest in knowing what other coaches in other sports do, but the way Brian Cody’s team went about devouring Tipperary in Nowlan Park last Sunday brought to mind a scene in a fascinating documentary about the NewEngland Patriots coach, Bill Belichick.

When I interviewed Anthony Lynch before Christmas to mark his retirement, it struck us just how much the welfare of Cork players had improved since his breakthrough year in 1999.

The way he has Crossmaglen Rangers playing should surprise no one who has ever known him.

A lot of the time people don’t know it’s her. They just think she looks a lot like “that athlete”.

UL would win by 37 points, a record-winning margin. They held DCU to just 27 points, another cup final record.

We’ve forgotten about it while they laugh about it now but back when Conor O’Shea was playing, an unimpressed George Hook publicly touted the theory that O’Shea must have been the subject of a frontal lobotomy, such was the poverty of his vision and decision-making.

It’s hard to know what’s the most daunting challenge in world sport right now but whatever it is, it exists at the upper echelons of men’s tennis.

Over the Christmas while he was back home for a few weeks, Tadhg Kennelly popped over to Cork and then to Limerick for a couple of days to give Ronan O’Gara, Tomás O’Leary and a number of their other Munster colleagues some pointers on how to improve catching the high ball.

MAYBE he thinks differently now, but the day before the most wonderful of games in a wonderful weekend’s Heineken Cup rugby, Conor O’Shea expressed the view to this writer in a Galway hotel that home field advantage in rugby was totally exaggerated