“I bumped into one fella who said we were red hot favourites for Killarney. I had to walk away from him”

MICHAEL SHIELDS nods and smiles, and there may even be a flicker of sympathy for an embattled journalist forced, once again, to ask him about a neighbouring county . . .

“I suppose we’ve been meeting them time and again, but there’s not an awful lot that we can do about that. All we can do is concentrate on the game this weekend, and treat it as that – just another game of football and to drive on like that. You can talk and talk about it, but what can you do only get back into it and get on with it?”

Pragmatism, learned in a hard school. Shields has played in two All-Ireland finals and lost both, but pessimism is poor nourishment. You invite him to pick over the positives for this year and Cork ‘s league success is exhibit A.