Since Tom Brady and Deflategate earlier this year, the match ball in sport has come under scrutiny, but the chances of such an episode being repeated at Croke Park on Sunday are slim to none, writes John Fogarty

Few champions have returned to the field under this thick a cloud. But as the accusations and rumours and innuendo pile up, New England Patriots players insist they have shut out the noise as they begin the defence of their Super Bowl title tonight against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Sometime in the future, when professional sport has been closed down altogether, people will probably look back at the time America’s finest legal minds produced a rebuttal website on behalf of the New England Patriots that contained these sentences: