Tom Humphries LockerRoom: The central plank of the fine recent novel by the Observer writer Will Buckley - The Man Who Hated Football - is the plight of a middle-aged football writer, Jimmy Stirling, who wakes up one morning and discovers he hates football.

There's not many of us sports scribblers who haven't had that experience at some time or other. An afternoon of phone calls to people who don't want to talk to you, people who react as if they might catch something off you, well, it dampens your vocational ardour. At the end of a few bad weeks of being a contagion, you consider trying something more popular - tax collector, snitch, pimp.

Never on a Sunday though. Never on a summer Sunday with the weather smiling and the road crooking its finger and the chance of a decent game at the end of it. You cover enough championships to make you a five-star bore in the company of young victims but the excitement of May and June never really palls. Okay, by September and the high farce of the "press nights" it will have palled plenty and the clichés will be issued by autopilot, but for the moment, humour us.

We're old and cranky now and proceed at a sedate pace towards our destination. Not as sedately as certain old and cranky predecessors who would travel to grand events slowly and cautiously, their journey sometimes taking several days during which they would sample the conversation and refreshments on offer in certain towns along the way.

We bundle into the car and grumble about the week's knock-backs. This manager who pretended not to be in and that player who said to ring back in an hour and seemingly got lost in the Bermuda Triangle of sporting communication. Such a litany of indignities, snubs, mortifications and humiliations.

This column won the award for most harrowing week with a fine double whammy. First a manager who politely wanted to wait till later before doing anything in depth. Forgot to ask him to do something shallow. Then two interviewees who became involved in the sale of the same horse and were too busy celebrating to talk sense or even nonsense. By this time things were so desperate that we considered forcing black coffee and cold showers on the lads, but . . .

Anyway, with all we suffer it's a wonder any of us pond scum can look each other in the eye.

Lunch on the Ennis Road and the usual fretting about parking. It's not so long ago since some of us couldn't drive and were hitching to matches, an era which is a different kettle of anecdotes. We stuff our faces, ask for 20 receipts and waddle out not just stately but plump with it.

The Gaelic Grounds is back in championship business after a break of six years. Everything has been done up except the wretched Mackey Stand with its funny angles and strange press box, a hothouse behind glass off-centre. There's tea and sandwiches and electricity available, however, which bumps it up to grade A, and yesterday it was an interesting place to be.

Munster is in a state of turmoil right now. Silent turmoil of course. Clare, shaken off their axis by the business with Waterford, are off in a dark corner licking their wounds and declining all press queries. Waterford, claiming not to be surprised by their odd return to championship vigour, are equally trying to deliberate in silence. Cork and Limerick prepared for yesterday's skirmish in monastic silence.

If there's a word out of Tipp this week, it'll be a surprise. Then silence. Why so?

Hurling lingers still on the verge of a breakthrough in popularity. The pleasures of playing the game are scantly evangelised but the game commends itself to young hands out of emulation and imitation.

Where are the guys stepping up to colonise young imaginations? There were 31,000 in the Gaelic Grounds yesterday and it was hard to see where another 18,000 would have fitted to fill the joint, and at least 60 per cent of those present were togged in replica jerseys. Are they not owed some form of communication even if it be filtered through us wretches?

The game threatened at times to grow into respectability but it was punctuated by too many bad refereeing decisions and not enough passages of fluent hurling. Maybe we're no experts up in the press box but we felt that perhaps giving a fella the hurl in the face was something more than a booking offence. We thought the outbreaks of handbagging shenanigans and fisticuffs in poor taste too. That's just us, though.

Limerick had Cork plenty rattled, of course, and Seán O'Connor's aerial pull to dump Niall Moran's free into the Cork net was such a perfect illustration of what you'd like a big full forward to do that it perplexed us somewhat when O'Connor was switched off The Rock not too long afterwards.

Limerick had that crucial deficiency which cripples so many teams at this level - a lack of confident scoretakers.

Young Andrew O'Shaughnessy opened his bag of tricks once or twice but never really got motoring. Niall Moran burst a gut, as did his brother Ollie and Mark Foley but they were up against too much.

Cork have a focused team with enough of a balance to them to go the distance on harder days like this. Afterwards, Donal O'Grady began the underdog heats by announcing that regardless of the standard of next week's game between Tipp and Waterford, his guys would be starting the Munster final as outsiders. The more things change the more they remain the same.

The teams (genius, this) lined out with virtually all the players playing in areas other than those they were picked in but generally in accordance with those versions of the line-up doing the rounds on certain internet sites.

Still, what else do we know? Clare will hammer Waterford. Cork will murder Limerick. Certainties! We knew that Brian Corcoran was a gimmick but a good one. Bring him on, lift the crowd, don't worry about what he does because he must have the first touch of a twitchy elephant by now. And on he comes and scores a point from his knees, such a sweet little heartbreaker of a point that it has press men reminiscing about Ring and one he scored in his pomp and has Limerick out of breath as if they had been dug in the guts.

Little tragedies like that kept pulling Limerick down after their brazen first-half performance. Even though there were only three points in it in the end, Cork proceeded with a robotic efficiency after the early exchanges. Go out. Win game. Talk yourself down. And that's the perfect beauty of it.

Everything changes. It's an all-fluid world. You set out to a match one day and come home. And the next day you're a little wiser, a little older and still have the mileage to collect on expenses.