Last Saturday afternoon, I had occasion to go into a pub in the afternoon with somebody, and that person summed up my feelings in one sentence when the blare from the televisions hit us.

The heat, eh?

We can talk about the history in a bit, and before long we’ll get to Donal O’Grady, the Limerick captain, and his groundbreaking rendition of Limerick You’re A Lady, not to mention the best final-whistle pitch-invasion we’ve seen in many years.

When the great boxing trainer Eddie Futch stopped Joe Frazier from going out to face Muhammad Ali late on in Manila all those years ago, he had good reason.

I wasn’t that sure about these Saturday evening games.

Limerick has hosted some of the all-time classic Munster hurling encounters

The most basic numerical system in the GAA is the team lineout: one to 15.

There’s a lot of silence around this weekend.

We’ve been dealing here in recent weeks with the raison d’etre of statistical analysis in the GAA – taking a leaf from the book The Numbers Game by Chris Anderson and David Sally, as well as checking in with Rob Carroll of gaelicstats.com.

A few weeks ago we sat down with Cork footballer Eoin Cadogan, who mentioned the course he was doing in Setanta College.