Before I led the Clarecastle team out at half-time of yesterday’s Clare county final, to collect our 25-year anniversary plaques, somebody handed me the 1994 county final programme. We beat a young St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield team that afternoon and, as I scanned the teams, Ger Hoey’s name jumped out at me.

As hurling people, we live for big days like excited kids on our birthday, but the All-Ireland final is usually our Christmas Day, the day when we are entitled to expect — and usually get — that little bit more.

Dónal Óg Cusack has expressed an interest in being the new Cork hurling manager.

Cork County Board chairperson Tracey Kennedy has said the executive will be looking for someone with a “strong coaching background” to fill the post vacated by John Meyler.

Joe Canning has admitted he was aware some thought his litany of serious injury setbacks might end his career and that he took satisfaction from proving them wrong.

Cork’s new management team won’t have the defensive experience of Christopher Joyce to call in 2020, it is feared.

MacHale Park provides few home comforts for Mayo in competitive football, as the accompanying statistics establish.

Ronan McCarthy has taken umbrage with those who class this weekend’s Super 8 fixture between Cork and Roscommon as a dead-rubber.

Just nine days after Ballyhale Shamrocks’ All-Ireland club final win last March, Adrian Mullen was handed his Kilkenny senior debut in a challenge against Cork.

Eoghan Cormican looks at the contenders to succeed John Meyler as Cork senior hurling manager.

John Meyler’s departure after two years as Cork senior hurling manager means the county is once again on the look-out for leadership.

Cork hurling legend and former coach Ger Cunningham reckons the material is there for the Rebels to prosper under new management in 2020.

Cork GAA chair Tracey Kennedy described Meyler as "an outstanding servant to Cork GAA in a variety of roles over many years"

Meyler led the Rebels to successive Munster titles in 2017 and 2018, but the defeat to Limerick in last year's All-Ireland semi-final left a lingering aftertaste in the county as Cork coughed up a late six-point lead.

The Limerick County Board have registered their disappointment and frustration with Croke Park about how they were denied a 65 in the penultimate play of Saturday’s All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Kilkenny.

Kelly said Tipperary's refusal to resort to hitting long balls and chasing goals, as Kilkenny did in their Leinster final loss to Wexford, was the key as they confronted disappointing refereeing decisions, being reduced to 14 men, and Wexford's best efforts.

The Galway hurling boss feels rigidly deploying a sweeper system can make it difficult to adapt during games.

Liam Sheedy didn’t want to talk about Kilkenny. Which was fair enough.

The GAA’s newly-appointed national match officials manager is open to the idea of more technology being used to assist referees, but has questioned just how far it can go.

Cork U20 captain Peter O’Driscoll has described as premature the commentary which pronounced Cork football as being dead and buried.

Here’s some of the stories we published on irishexaminer.com today which we hope will help you make sense of it all this evening.

Speaking on the Irish Examiner GAA podcast, panelists Ken Hogan and Anthony Daly agreed that the Leinster champions should do all they can to keep Davy in the south-east.

Gallagher led the side to the Ulster final last year where they were defeated by Donegal before being knocked out of the championship by Kildare.

Ken Hogan, Ger Cunnigham and Brian Hogan join Anthony Daly to dissect the weekend's All-Ireland semi-finals.

Coming up this weekend, there are the final four games in the Super 8s as well as the U20 hurling semi-finals to look ahead to.

The winners had three goals disallowed but finished strongly to secure a final berth against Kilkenny - the county that Cleere hails from.

While we had two dramatic All-Ireland semi-finals that went down to the wire, unfortunately, the standard of refereeing will come under scrutiny.

Sift through the entrails of yesterday’s All-Ireland semi-final any which way you want, but both managers were adamant that the long break in between the Leinster final and this encounter had nothing to do with who won and who lost.

Having been nine points adrift as early as the 17th minute, Limerick would have given their right arm if offered there and then a 1-12 to 1-9 interval scoreline.

Twenty minutes to go, five points and a man down after John McGrath’s silly sending off and you could almost hear the sounds of the knives being sharpened for Tipperary and this generation of players.

Brian Cody has never sought to overly complicate matters. Whatever about the tactical nuances he may attempt to implement or, indeed counter, the Kilkenny manager is fully aware that any game-plan must be built on the non-negotiables of spirit, honesty, character and work-rate.

Davy Fitzgerald is the very human version of an iPhone.

There’s no value in told-you-so’s and there’s no satisfaction in them either but what happened yesterday was in the offing.

Dublin U20 manager Tom Gray expressed relief after surviving Galway’s spirited challenge in the Eirgrid All-Ireland football semi-final at Glennon Brothers Pearse Park.

Selector. Coach. Friend. Many words can be used to describe Seoirse Bulfin’s relationship with Davy Fitzgerald since they first met in 2003. And after helping steer Wexford to tomorrow’s All-Ireland semi-final, he hopes there is another chapter to write

We’ll skip with the preamble. Any assessment of where the Cork hurlers go from here has to start with where John Meyler goes from here.

Tomorrow’s meeting with Limerick is a chance for Tipp to rest some ‘made men’

When five minutes went up on the board yesterday, I said to Brendan Cummins that a draw would be the fairest result.

Fitzgerald was dismissed in the second half after a confrontation with the fourth official.

If you stepped aboard a flight today, and you heard Jim Gavin introduce himself as the captain from the cockpit, you would feel immediately reassured.

After the same county lifted the MacCarthy Cup on seven occasions in the noughties, the decade that followed was always going to be more democratic.

Rising Wexford hurling star Rory O’Connor reckons the next generation of inter-county players will be paid for their efforts.

Any time I’m on the road on a Saturday evening, I always tune into Céilí House, one of RTÉ Radio’s most popular programmes of traditional Irish music and song, writes Anthony Daly.

When we won the All-Ireland with Clare in 1995, the following year’s league kicked off that October. The celebrations obviously took their toll early in the campaign. We lost our first match to Kerry but the bank of fitness we’d built up stood to us as October segued into November. We went up to Birr and put on an exhibition against Offaly in our last match before the winter-break.