There may be a full round of pool games to go over the course of the next seven days but already five teams, including Ireland, have booked a safe passage to the knockout phase of the Rugby World Cup.

Independence Day should be tough to beat in the Rainbow Communications 2-Y-O Maiden on Ulster Derby day in Down Royal.

Roy Keane has never been afraid to show his emotions.

A decade and a day separated the miracle match and miracle men from those with designs on joining them in Munster’s hall of fame.

It’s strange to be discussing an All-Ireland senior hurling final in late September but what is even more unusual is the low key build up to this replay.

Ned Kelly, the Irish-Australian folk hero, was a man who robbed, pillaged and murdered his way through life.

As the dust settles on what will arguably go down as the Republic of Ireland’s greatest sporting anti-climax, sports followers in this country can be thankful they have a summer of exciting GAA action as an antidote to the national side’s dreadful Euro 2012 campaign.

In truth, many of the travelogues coming back from Poland this week have been tiresome, ‘Temple Bar on tour’ stereotypes.

There he goes again, getting stuck into the Irish psyche.

THE season finale that everyone, with the possible exception of Declan Kidney, wanted has been delivered with Leinster and Munster successfully negotiating their way through their respective Magners League semi-finals over the weekend.

IT’S often I look in bewilderment at an article in the sports pages with an expression similar to those which Usain Bolt’s competitors convey as the Jamaican sprinter glides past like he’s on rails.

WE IRISH are a proud lot.

MUNSTER have been dealt a major blow with the news that scrum-half Tomás O’Leary has been ruled out for up to two months with a thumb injury.

THE price of cattle in Ireland has changed very little over the past 20 years. The cost of feeding an animal over the winter months, including veterinary charges, would just about match the sale price.

“WE were out-Munstered by Leinster.”

AM I the only Irishman that went to Cheltenham during Gold Cup week just to drink water? If I’m not, then I’m certainly a member of a very small club and that’s for sure.

THE celebrated Fields of Athenry didn’t reveal any gushing oil wells yesterday, but farm forestry owners were told they could become heat suppliers of the future.

IT WAS the comments of South Africa’s World Cup-winning captain John Smit that resonated most over the weekend.

THE upcoming Rugby World Cup brings to mind the Fields of Athenry reverberating around Lansdowne. Written, of course, by that master songwriter Pete St John, who I last saw in Dublin protesting against the proposed motorway through Tara.

IRELAND’S Eddie O’Sullivan was the latest coach to sing Italy’s praises yesterday and he clearly meant it when he admitted that he very much feared the Azzurri in today’s final match of the RBS Six Nations Championship at the Stadio Flaminio.

THE Fields of Athenry aren’t so lonely now. In fact, in years to come those fields will be packed with more than the 70,000 who were actually present because the bewildered will try convince their grandchildren that — as Max Boyce is wont to say — “I was there”.

AN immovable Munster pack yesterday magnificently overcame Leinster at a glorious Lansdowne Road.

A DUBLIN woman yesterday paid 8,500 for two tickets for Ireland’s Grand Slam showdown with England.

MUNSTER’S dream of reaching the quarter-finals of the Heineken European Cup for the fifth year in succession lies in tatters after a bitterly disappointing performance and comprehensive defeat by Perpignan in the Stade Aime Giral on Saturday.

Gregor Townsend looks to have played his last big game for Castres following the French club’s Heineken Cup semi-final demise against Munster in Beziers.

Ireland are on a winning streak in Flaminio Stadium as the strains of Fields of Athenry ring out around the grounds.