Gary Brennan: If Derry maintain form, the rest will struggle to live with them

ON THE RISE: Derry's Gareth McKinless scores his side's fourth goal on Saturday against Clare.

And then there were four. A weekend that was highly-anticipated but didn’t quite ignite in the way many hoped. 

I often feel that we can be very hard to please. Yes, we all want exciting games and the best possible showcases, but there’s sometimes a romanticised view that every game must be a cracker. I understand the argument that by quarter final stage, we want to see the best teams thrash it out in the way Galway and Armagh did on Sunday and that the standard should be reaching near peak - however, the reality is that it rarely happens until the very latter stages of almost any competition.