THE Ballinacourty footballers are an experienced bunch who’ve dealt with plenty of heartbreak in recent years.

YOU know by now that Donal Óg Cusack is the new Cork senior hurling captain. Of course you do.

WE had our topic nicely selected for this corner well ahead of time: The GAA County by County, a typically handsome production by Con Collins and his colleagues at the Collins Press.

A COMMUNAL green area in a Cork suburb doesn’t look like an obvious theatre of dreams.

CALL it karma, call it coincidence, call it the circularity of history, but if anyone in the FAI was tuned in last weekend for Wales versus Ireland in the Rugby World Cup, their hearts must have skipped a beat when Shane Williams touched down for that crucial early try. And we don’t mean skipped in a bad way.

JOHN ALLEN said yesterday he was “flattered and delighted” to be approached to manage Limerick, having been ratified as senior hurling manager of the Treaty County on Tuesday night.

EARLY start last Saturday morning, to get the City Special edition out on the final whistle of Ireland-Wales at the Rugby World Cup.

ANYONE who reads The Guardian will be familiar with John Crace’s ‘Digested Reads’, where the journalist takes a well-known book and compresses it down to six or seven hundred words, a process that tends to isolate the good — and bad — aspects of the tome in question (try his filleting of Philip Roth’s ‘Exit Ghost’ for a taster).

A GENERAL or a chairman? The number of empty bainisteoir bibs in the inter-county hurling world is unusually high at the moment – at the time of writing Antrim, Galway, Laois, Clare, Wexford, Cork, Waterford and Limerick have changed or are about to change. There are merry-go-rounds, and then there are merry-go-rounds.

IT’S in the nature of the GAA beast to get all post-modern when it comes to All Star nominations: what’s not in the text, hidden codes, all that jazz.