After watching them enter Kerry’s backyard last Saturday and inflict on them their first championship defeat at Fitzgerald Stadium since 1995, Jim McGuinness is left wondering – whisper it – if Mayo might just do the “unthinkable” this year.
They have, he writes, “the best athletic profile in the country... size, speed, power and agility”, but if they are to finally end an All-Ireland-winning drought that stretches back to, gulp, 1951, they have to find consistency.
In hurling, Ian O’Riordan hears from former Waterford star Michael Brick Walsh whose biggest bugbear with the game these days is players going down too easily and “rolling around the ground”.
Wexford’s hurlers went down a bit easily themselves against Westmeath last weekend – not to the ground, but on the scoreboard. Their collapse was akin to “a Hollywood detonation”, writes Gordon Manning who picks over the bones of their surrendering of that 17 point lead.
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‘Tell us about it,’ Leinster would reply. They might only have lost their URC semi-final and Champions Cup decider by a combined total of three points, but, writes Gerry Thornley, “there is an overwhelming sense of underachievement and even a sense of failure, by themselves more than anyone else”.
Owen Doyle, though, believes that Leo Cullen and Stuart Lancaster will have plenty of legitimate questions to ask of the refereeing in the final, reckoning that Jaco Peyper didn’t have his finest day. The breakdown, in particular, “needed a stronger approach” from him, “he was too patient with the culprits”.
John O’Sullivan, meanwhile, talks to the four Irish officials who will be on duty at the World Cup, referee Andy Brace, assistant referee Chris Busby and television match officials Brian MacNeice and Joy Neville, Neville set to become the first woman to officiate at the men’s finals.
While Leinster’s season might be over, Munster have the small matter of the URC final to conclude theirs, Gerry talking to their South African old boys CJ Stander and Jean de Villiers about their chances of beating the Stormers in Cape Town next Saturday.
And we hear from Rory McIlroy after he tied for seventh at the US PGA Championship, a finish that he thinks “glosses over some of the cracks in my game”. “I feel sort of close but also so far away at the same time,” he says. Wexford and Leinster can relate.
Telly watch: After Monday’s rest day, the Giro d’Italia enters its final week today with both Irish riders going well – Eddie Dunbar is eighth overall and Ben Healy is fourth in the King of the Mountains contest. You can follow their progress on Eurosport (9.30am-5pm). And this evening, the RTÉ News channel has live coverage of the Republic of Ireland’s do-or-die game against Hungary at the under-17 European Championships (kick-off 7.0).
