Peadar Healy is an under-the-radar sort, so announcing themselves with 1-18 against the second-ranked team in the country is probably leaping a little too energetically into February for the new manager of the Cork footballers.

Dressing Rooms No 1 and No 2 are only feet apart at Mallow GAA’s stately Carrigoon complex, but the swing of a left foot yesterday daubed one in black and green despair, and turned the other into forever folk heroes in Tipperary.

Kerry bid for their second back-to-back All-Ireland in less than a decade tomorrow at Croke Park, but you’d have got long odds on that in 2012 after they’d lost a quarter-final to Donegal. No-one was putting their hand up to replace Jack O’Connor, something Kerry GAA chairman Patrick O’Sullivan recognised better than most. So what’s changed? And how much longer can the Kingdom stay top of the tree

In an industry struggling to reinvent itself, the freelance photographer gets squeezed more than most. All the more so, when it’s a sports-specific effort, like Healy Racing in Listowel. As the local September festival kicks off this weekend, Pat Healy reflects on the trade, characters, and moments he’ll remember — and the ones he can’t forget.

In North Kerry, they like to pull wins from their bootlaces, so Eamonn Fitzmaurice must have enjoyed yesterday.

There was no delay. Darran O’Sullivan and Gooch were still razing Kildare on Jones Road as Kerry’s medical team got to work on the James O’Donoghue rehab strategy.

Such is the haste from which Cork football runs away from anything current to view everything through the distorted prism of July’s first Sunday, we can summarily discount yesterday’s 11-point victory over Kerry as utterly irrelevant, says Tony Leen.

The sense of unfinished business has lured four-time All-Ireland winner Paul Galvin into the unlikeliest of sporting u-turns — a return to the Kerry fold last night in Tralee, with a stated aim of winning a fifth Celtic Cross medal next September.

The night after Ballincollig surprised everyone by stepping over Nemo Rangers into a first Cork county football final, manager Michael O’Brien sat his management team, some players and members of the club’s executive down, writes Tony Leen.