Rebels unveil a new lethal weapon

IT turned on a close-in free and a penalty. Of course it did.

After a week of conflation, interpretation, and a little trepidation, not to mention months of focus on 20-metre lines, roll-lifts, striking and goal-scoring, we should have known that Cork versus Clare would find a hinge in the very incidents that the GAA world seemed fixated upon for the last seven days.

In one sense, the existence of the game as a Munster SHC semi-final was subservient to its status as a laboratory to examine the solidity of the new dead-ball dispensation, and the game was less than quarter of an hour old when the first experiment was set up.