No-one’s going to Killarney for the scenery

IF Bertie Ahern is entitled to an artist’s exemption on the grounds that a certain amount of creative and imaginative toil went into the production of his biography, then surely the humble hack tasked with previewing the National League deserves similar treatment.

We can make confident-sounding predictions but, in truth, guessing what will happen in the National League in any given year requires a leap of imagination as great as anything managed by our former Taoiseach. The league remains the most curious of competitions, unique almost in a global sporting context in that it tends to generate more excitement at the start of competition than it does at climax.

The fun at this time of the GAA year is in trying to figure out who wants to win the league more and who needs to win the league more.