Countdown over as season’s dreams begin here

Hurling: If your Sunday night drinking buddies are anything like my Sunday night drinking buddies, dear reader, and I rather suspect they may be — assuming you possess Sunday night drinking buddies to begin with — they’ll have been counting down the days for weeks now.

Counting down the days to next weekend.

“No more matches to talk about for another two months,” as one of my lot grumbled the night of the Leinster club final last December. It wasn’t that his team had won and couldn’t wait for the All-Ireland semi-finals; his team hadn’t even been playing. It was more because yer man was a hurling man and therefore the hurling world was his oyster. The Leinster club final had been live on TG4 and therefore was of interest to yer man and to all hurling folk, irrespective of province and provenance. Like all TV games, it was the sporting equivalent of an interesting new species of insect, to be watched in real time and dissected at leisure afterwards.