The winter Gaelic games hiatus is nearly upon us. There’ll be plenty of senior club action to satisfy our desire for competitive GAA action over the coming months, but the majority of clubs around the country are just about shutting down after another busy year of action.

Back in January 2014, I was asked to speak at the national coaching and games conference in Croke Park as part of a keynote address discussing some of the factors that made Kerry and Kilkenny seemingly perennial contenders in the senior football and hurling championships.

When Mike Tyson was asked if he was concerned about the plan that the more strategic Evander Holyfield would bring to their title fight, the champ dismissively replied: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.

Croke Park will surely be filled with a very different type of atmosphere next Sunday afternoon than the peaceful holiness brought by Pope Francis last weekend.

Watching the All-Ireland hurling final has only solidified a strange season for followers of Gaelic football.

Dublin footballers continue to be somewhat of a quandary for everybody outside the capital, don’t they? It’s like people are torn between really appreciating what they’re doing through their incredible domination of the competition, or utterly despising it because of the obvious advantages they have enjoyed getting there, writes Mike Quirke

I was in a bar down the road from Fitzgerald Stadium before the Kerry-Kildare game last Saturday. The volume on the TV was turned up as the Irish women’s hockey team began their second penalty shoot-out of the tournament for a place in the final of the World Cup.

A couple of years ago, Ronan O’Gara wrote in these pages that: “The more I am learning, the less I take for granted what I savoured in the Munster dressing room every day as a player. A club’s culture is an unspoken language. The trademark. You can’t see it or hear it. You feel it.”