On Gaelic Games: I remember a former colleague saying a publication's best writer should be dispatched to the losing dressingroom on big occasions. It was a fair point - defeat always triggers more intensity and human interest - but best writers generally have no more appetite than any other kind of writer for the awkwardness and upset generated by defeat.

Being amateur intensifies the experience for GAA teams. There's nothing else tangible to play for - just the prize. Individually, players may be glad that they played well in defeat but it doesn't matter a great deal in the overall context.

There are no other potential teams whose managers might like the look of you during a high-profile defeat and can whisk you off to a different set-up that might promise greater success. Footballers and hurlers are by and large stuck with what they've got and all the career parameters that implies.

Eamon Dunphy made the point in his book Only a Game that professionals have to move on quickly after losing. There's another match to come and a chance to do better. You learn to put defeat behind you.

"You know the difference between me and you?" Derry's Seán Martin Lockhart asked his Aussie marker during one International Rules test while being taunted about being an amateur. "I play for the honour; you do it for money."

Complicating the amateur need for victory as personal vindication is the GAA's sense of locality and the representation of a wider community of family and friends.

How often has it arisen in the aftermath of matches? Dublin's Brian Mullins, a player who distributed his All-Ireland medals amongst his family, said after the infamous 1983 final against Galway that he felt he had let his family down by being sent off that day.

Players think of their parents, family and community, proud that they have brought something back to those who gave them so much or disproportionately distressed that they have failed to do so.

This dichotomy is one of several fascinating strands running through Christy O'Connor's absorbing book, Last Man Standing - Hurling Goalkeepers.

For those who stand in goal in any sport, the stakes are higher than for outfield players and the solitude more pronounced. They hear the abuse of the crowd more clearly - and attract it more easily - than their team-mates.

These outsize pressures that run parallel to the ordinary demands of training, preparation and attention to performance are all vividly illustrated in O'Connor's story of around a dozen goalkeepers and their fortunes during 2004.

Even in the acknowledgements the author, himself a keeper of some standing with an All-Ireland club medal, dedicates the book to his parents, emphasises the importance of his siblings and speaks of his brother James, the renowned Clare hurler now retired, and "the great pride and honour" he brought to the family.

The book is dominated by Dónal Óg Cusack, the Cork keeper whose obsessive attention to detail and determination along with his team to redeem themselves for the 2003 All-Ireland final, which they narrowly lost to Kilkenny, provides the story's most enduring narrative.

Through flashback and contemporary narrative the reader is led through Cusack's influence on the team from the first shots he fired almost exactly three years ago in the revolution that turned Cork into the most fastidiously prepared team in the country.

Yet in the midst of organising a players' strike, training for a county team and even coaching his club, Cloyne, Cusack deals with the quotidian malice and casual bad- mouthing that - paradoxically in the GAA's tightly woven world - come from fellow county people and seem to be part of the burden of being a high-profile player.

He hears of a Cork supporter on television praising Wexford's goalkeeper Damien Fitzhenry after the annihilation of last year's All-Ireland semi-final.

Gracious tribute to a defeated opponent isn't enough and the supporter continues: "And if we'd had him for the last few years we'd have won a lot more than we have."

Cusack is iron-willed and undeterred by the insults.

But he resents them, at one stage deliberately standing behind a tormentor during the second fixture of a double bill, having endured abuse all through his own match.

His young sister Treasa is reduced to tears by the torrents of trash talking pumped in her direction when some Braveheart on the terrace recognises her during the qualifier with Tipp in Killarney. In a way family can become your vulnerability as well as your inspiration.

Not everyone has Cusack's rock-steady assurance. His opposite number this weekend, Galway captain Liam Donoghue, agonises after last year's fearful hammering by Kilkenny in Thurles.

"I wouldn't be that confident," he says. "My biggest problem in goals is that I'm not half confident enough."

Donoghue reproaches himself for not being good enough to execute a short-puck-

out strategy, the lack of which was one of Galway's key calamities on the day.

Donoghue's stoical acknowledgement of his difficulties and determination to address them before this year lend an air of optimism or defiance to this intense introspection.

"I've spent my whole life trying to get into this position and it's heartbreak. But if I asked myself in the morning would I do it again, I'd say, 'Definitely.'"

But for his predecessor Séamus Shinnors there was no shot at redemption. Dropped abruptly before the 1980 championship, which Galway won for the first time in 57 years, the former Tipperary player is left to torture himself with thoughts of two soft goals he conceded in the previous year's final against Kilkenny.

Shinnors tells O'Connor that he thought about those goals every day for 15 years. Others helped remind him. There were for instance taunts about the £10,000 that according to one preposterous calumny he was rumoured to have been paid to throw the game.

"As far as I'm concerned that is the only game of hurling that I ever played in my life," he bleakly concludes.

It's a sobering thought that as the multitudes drift away from Croke Park next Sunday, either to celebrate or mourn the outcome, some player or other could be facing into the first hours of a lifetime's regret.

Last Man Standing - Hurling Goalkeepers by Christy O'Connor (O'Brien Press: €14.95)