A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

Storylines everywhere - but Kerry and Cork dominate the 2026 focus

- Garry DOYLE

A NEW year, then. A new dawn. A new season.

And in the GAA, that usually means one thing above all else: hope, freshly laundered, hung out to dry in January air.

The Leagues begin again, football and hurling side by side, expectation stretching ahead like a long, uncertain road. New managers step into old traditions. Old counties try to remember who they were, or convince us they are something new.

Ger Brennan is one of them.

Dublin's latest custodian, a man who performed something, close to a sporting miracle in Louth, coaxing belief from a team long accustomed to resignation.

He made underdogs feel 10 feet tall.

Now comes the harder trick.

Dublin do not do underdog They do scrutiny. They do entitlement.

They do judgement.

Brennan has shown he can make players believe.

The question now is whether he can make them cope when everyone else already does.

In hurling, Ben O'Connor arrives at Cork with a very different inheritance: promise without payoff.

Last year felt like a turning point. Cork won the League for the first time since 1998. They won Munster for the first time since 2018.

Everything appeared to be lining up.

Except the one thing that matters.

Twenty one years have now passed since Liam MacCarthy was last paraded down Patrick Street.

In that time Kilkenny have lifted it eight times, Limerick five, Tipperary four, Clare twice, Galway once. Cork have watched them all.

Most recently Tipperary, of course.

Ah, Tipperary.