New Model welcome, but old order will be restored

Sometimes like in boxing there are matchups that the hurling public craves but doesn’t get.

A lot of winter talk that lasted even into part of the summer was taken up with how would Kilkenny deal with Clare’s style of play in a likely meeting in Croke Park; that intriguing championship matchup will now have to wait another year, if it ever comes at all in the guise we’d yearned.

In the late 1990s Clare and Wexford brought such colour and personality to the old game that they lit up that era but it is a regret that for one day only they didn’t simultaneously get to light up Croke Park.