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.

Last Friday there was a press evening for the Cork hurlers ahead of Sunday’s Munster SHC semi-final.

We should really have begun this series with the interview below, but we couldn’t get Chris Anderson on the line in time.

Chris Anderson, what is possession?

“Professional sport is funny, because it’s a business, but if you refer to it as a business you can strike the wrong note.”

Case for the prosecution.

There seems to be no shortage of statistic boffins emerging from the US, and the latest numbers genius to catch the zeitgeist seems to be Nate Silver, now well known from the FiveThirtyEight Blog at the New York Times.

The reference to golf elsewhere on the page was sparked by a book I borrowed last week, Over Time by Frank DeFord, which contains an elegantly exasperated head-shake over the pretentions of that sport.