Dean Rock refuses to be sucked in by questions about you know who

Make no mistake, the Dubs can play all out defence with the best of them.

Four days after Carlow presented them with a 15-man blanket and the All-Ireland champions were parking the bus at Parnell Park with Dean Rock — a forward, fittingly enough — pulling the handbrake on anything that might approximate to an interesting conversation about Diarmuid Connolly.

You couldn’t blame the player, stuck as he was between the proverbial and a hard place for a pre-arranged Aer Lingus promotional event that reportedly caused the team’s brains trust all sorts of palpitations after Connolly was landed with a proposed 12-week ban the night before.