I’M sitting at a small table in a restaurant in Castleisland with the most influential man in Kerry football over the last ten years for company.

Last week Donal Óg Cusack wrote a piece for the GAA’s website on the nature of the relationships between those responsible for what we see on the field of play and those whose job it is to record such events and anything which they may perceive to be of note either side of the week’s most important 70 minutes.

Tyler Hamilton in his best-selling book The Secret Race informed us about the detail Lance Armstrong and his team put into preparation.

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 has to be one of the most magical coach-player relationships in all of Irish sport, this bond the 70-something Eamonn Ryan and his Rebels have, and six All-Irelands in seven years is far too crude a measure of it.

MEA CULPA.

JOHN WOODEN knew a thing or two about winning.