A final pairing nobody could have predicted

A long time ago Jimmy Breslin wrote a baseball book entitled Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? Don’t get offended, people of Clare. I refer to those of us in the pontification game, and in particular those of us who were in Limerick last April for the relegation play-off.

Nobody there on that occasion saw Clare and Cork as a potential All-Ireland final pairing; when they met a couple of months afterwards we didn’t see much to change our minds either.

Yet here we are.