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.

The retirement of Ronan O’Gara ends a career that long ago edged from impressive to incredible.

Hot on the heels of Donegal player Paddy McBrearty’s no show a couple of weeks ago at a GAA disciplinary hearing, we now have the ‘Corbett-Delaney Avoidance’, which sounds more Richard Ludlum thriller title than GAA embarrassment.

In the absence of the man with the most famous baseball cap in Kilkenny, Cats selector Michael Dempsey faced the media after yesterday’s narrow win over Tipperary in the league final.