Championship loses one of its luminaries

It says something about the stature and skill of the man that we’re talking more about how football will miss Colm Cooper this year than Kerry will miss him.

If it were a goalkeeper, defender, a midfielder, even any other forward, it would be about how big a loss he would be to his team, first and foremost.

Michael Darragh MacAuley’s absence would be a terrible blow to Dublin, ditto Michael Murphy’s to Donegal, Aidan Walsh’s to Cork, but the conversation would be merely about how it would affect the outcome of the football year, not the fare of football itself.