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.

JETLAGGED he may be after a flight home to London from the States, but Simon Garfield can still summon enough energy to talk, to engage, and to condemn.

The scoresheet in the hurling included an unlikely name: M. Moynihan 0-2, (0-1f). The World Cup comes around every four years.

SORRY.

KILKENNY, then.