Malachy Clerkin is wondering if you all got through the first weekend of the new football rules “safe and sound?” And he advises you to “take with a boatload of salt the opinion of anyone talking about the new rules with absolute certainty”. It’s the earliest of days, after all, “there are miles to go and the Football Review Committee’s work is nowhere near done”.
But one man who is exceedingly happy with the tweaks is Galway’s Cillian Ó Curraoin who was player of the match on Saturday. “For an inside forward they are unbelievable,” he tells Seán Moran. “I went up and I watched the interpros and I was really licking my lips.”
Maurice Deegan liked what he saw too last weekend, it went “about as well as anyone could have hoped,” he writes. “There were no big systems failures nor obviously unintended consequences,” although he also concedes there might well be trouble farther down the line.
As one of our crack team, as they insist we call them, of GAA reporters, Malachy chips in with Seán, Gordon Manning and Denis Walsh to “Five things we learned from the weekend” - and he was left wiggling an eyebrow at Liam Cahill goading the Tipperary hurling public.
Ireland v England: TV details, kick-off time and team news for Six Nations opener
Gerry Thornley: Odds are against Ireland completing Six Nations three-peat, this is my forecast
Maurice Deegan: An encouraging start for the football rules but a long road ahead
New football rules arrive ‘about as well as anyone could have hoped’
Speaking of goading. Johnny Watterson is in Quinta do Lago with the Irish rugby squad this week and in his diary from there he mentions sunshine and heat quite a bit. It hasn’t all been sun-bathing, though, Johnny getting down to some work when he heard from IRFU Performance Director David Humphreys who addressed the issue of Leinster surging ahead of the other provinces.
Gerry Thornley, meanwhile, dips in to the history of the Six Nations to get a pointer on Ireland’s chances of completing a three-in-a-row - the fact that it has never been done before “suggests the odds are against them”. He also has a look at what shape Wales are in going in to the tournament. Not great.
What Owen Doyle would love to see more than anything in the Six Nations is the scrum being given back “its true identity, its purpose”. “Too often it is a chaotic shambles, leaving referees with the unenviable task of deciphering what the hell is going on,” he writes.
In his Different Strokes column, Philip Reid looks ahead to Anna Foster’s first appearance on the European Tour since earning her card at Q-School, and in racing Brian O’Connor reports on the Dublin Racing Festival continuing to be a big draw for British fans despite the lack of cross-channel runners.
TV Watch: If you opted not to sit up in to the early hours to watch Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links take on Rory McIlroy’s Boston Common in that TGL lark, then Sky Sports Golf brings it all to you again at 1.0 this afternoon and at 7.0 this evening. And from 1.0, TNT Sports 1 have coverage of England’s third T20 against India - they’re 2-0 down in the five-match series, so no pressure.
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