Championship Preview: Go on someone. Make our day

Twenty years ago, Loughnane’s Clare emerged from nowhere to set the summer alight. Are we there again, waiting for a bolter to win the All Ireland, a team to come from the clouds and cut a swathe through a mediocre field?

“It’s an amazing thing. It’s kind of a sport that defies logic. People shouldn’t even be able to do that – to hit the ball on the run with opponents trying to take your head off”

- Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, on the grá he developed for hurling during his time living in Dublin in the mid-1990s