The real questions beginning to be answered in August

A four game Semple stadium marathon - with the sustenance of tea, ham sandwiches and cake - began Saturday afternoon, ended late Sunday night.

We saw Austin Gleeson's mighty rise and the beginnings of Conor Whelan. We saw the demise of Cork GAA. For 2015 anyway.

The Kildare footballers soundly beat Cork, Galway minor hurlers overcame Limerick, Waterford steamed past Dublin and the Galway seniors obliterated Cork. Sunday's packed press box humdrum was punctuated by the cheerful cajoling of Cyril Farrell coupled with the occasional seething utterance from Donal O'Grady.

The Cork footballers were worse than their hurlers but it was a close enough debate that nobody from the rebel county wanted to be having on the road home.

You have to wonder about the candidacy of those who survived the cull:

can Kildare really get under Kerry’s skin this Sunday. Unlikely.

Will Waterford’s strategic trickery be able to transfix Kilkenny? Probably not.

Still, it was a thrill to see Gleeson and Maurice Shanahan in full flow. Dublin played to their limit yet always trailed by a few points as, eventually, the slightest defensive failing saw Shane Bennett gallop clear and feed Shanahan for the killer second goal.

Waterford, with plenty of natural hurlers, are real.

Galway looked better still. Their meeting with Tipperary in the All-Ireland semi-final is unmissable.

And what about Joe Canning? Can he finally be crowned the dominant hurler of his generation or will that honour be shared among TJ Reid and Richie Hogan or snatched away by Bonner and Pádraic Maher?

August will answer that but Joe knows himself: “I am kind of sick of people talking about what a great year we had in 2012. We didn’t win an All-Ireland. We got to an All-Ireland final.”

That will never be enough. GC

Galway far from a one man machine

Part of the thrill of filing on-line match reports on the final whistle is adding up the scorers as quickly as possible. It’s nearly always more fun in hurling, and so it proved in Thurles on Sunday on afternoon after Galway put 2-28 past Cork.

Joe Canning only scored 0-5? Could that be right? Johnny Glynn 1-2? Conor Whelan 1-2? And Cathal Mannion 0-7? Jason Flynn 0-3, and Cyril Donnellan, David Burke, Aidan Harte 0-2 each? Andy Smith 0-1? And the subs? Joseph Cooney 0-1? Niall Healy 0-1? Is that it then? And 2-24 of that from play?

So, 30 scores, 11 different scorers, and not forgetting Galway’s 23 wides, either. It’s been a while since any hurling team treated us to a task like that, and considering at least half of those wides could well have been scored, it could have been closer to a cricket score.

Now, whatever about the increasing leakage of the Cork defence, and their generally disappointing resistance to almost everything Galway threw at them, this was seriously impressive. Glynn’s 1-2 was only a small slice of his powerful contribution, and Whelan - born 31/10/1996, so still only 18 years of age - was a proper revelation.

It sets up a fascinating All-Ireland semi-final against Munster champions Tipperary, who boast a considerable artillery of their own. For all those Galway scoring stats, perhaps the most telling was that Canning also struck eight shots wide. They say the hurling championship has yet to catch fire. Yet Galway, no one can deny now, and brewing up a storm. IO