Does this great game ever really fail us?

All summer we’ve been waiting for this championship to fire. It had been damp. Lifeless even. Nobody could manage to generate the faintest spark.

We’d been hoping and hoping for something to ignite and when it finally did yesterday, it was like opening the door to a backdraft.

This semi-final was epic, one of the best I’ve ever seen in Croke Park. After the diving and hair-tossing episode last weekend between Tyrone and Monaghan, the GAA world were taking a hammering all week about cynical play and borrowing the worst habits from the Premiership. It was a football issue but hurling couldn’t really cock its nose either and say we have a superior product because we had no real evidence to back up that routine claim hurling people like to make.