Ode to a joyous championship

The player

Here, it seemed, was the typical corner-forward: neat, nippy and irredeemably lightweight. If ever there was someone who might have found himself surplus to requirements under John Kiely, it was the Kilmallock man, the more so in view of the new manager’s determination to assemble a physically commanding forward line. Instead, Mulcahy went the other way and became the brightest of the county’s constellation of quiet stars in 2018.

There was the consistency of his scoring: 0-4 against Tipperary, 0-2 against Cork, 1-0 against Waterford, nothing in Ennis (withdrawn at the interval as a sacrificial lamb following the red cards), 1-1 against Carlow, 0-3 against Kilkenny, 0-4 in the All-Ireland semi-final and 1-2 on Sunday.