Time now to reflect on the best gaelic team ever.

[Lar Naparka]

Cork did to ladies football what Dublin are in the process of doing to mens football.

What this Cork team did was raise the standard of the game. The great Kerry mens team of 1975 -86 won eight All Ireland's and did something similar to the athletic standard of GAA. Neither team has damaged the GAA. The current Dublin team have won 2 All Ireland's a feat matched by your own county. I can't see the destruction of the GAA here. Dublin, like Kerry & Cork ladies will eventually be beaten by a team that matches or surpasses them and possibly by their own complacency or decline.Hopefully that will happen in a fortnight if our team prove good enough. If not it will take a little longer.

I usually agree with most of what you write but we part company here.
Did Kerry's dominance damage the GAA? It certainly did, short term at least. According to Eamonn Sweeney, the Sindo hack, just 17,523 turned up for the Kingdom's semi against Armagh in 1982.That was only a single game but the fall off in attendances was repeated throughout the land and the GAA lost heavily. Same for the great Galway team of the 60s.
Predictable results on the field led to equally predictable drop offs in paying spectators.
I read some time ago (Sweeney again I think) that the qualifiers last year would have been run at a loss if Mayo and its loyal supporters hadn't been involved.
The Leinster championship has seen a dramatic fall off in paying customers and also in playing standards as others realise the sheer futility of attempting to mix it with Dublin.
The outstanding difference between Dublin today and Kerry in the 70s/80s is money, plain and simple. The age of Professionalism and Science has arrived and no other team in the land can afford to go to the same lengths as Dublin in preparing players mentally and physically.
I mean Kerry players of that era hadn't every aspect of their lives controlled by experts with the sole purpose of having them at the peak of their potential every time the team takes the field.
I can never see the time when DUblini lose their dominance. Others, Mayo this year hopefully, may sneak an odd title along the way. After all it's fifteen against fifteen and on the day surprises can happen but the odds will  favour Dublin every year.
I can't see them losing interest either, no matter how many AIs on the trot they secure. The competition for places is red-hot and there is more than enough quality players for Dublin to field the two strongest teams in the land.
The great Kerry and Galway teams I've referred to had no material advantage over their competitors. I know the present Dublin team, bench and all, are talented players but there's more than innate skill involved. They have advantages that only money can buy.
Supposing, just supposing, that Mayo and Dublin were to have swapped places a couple of months before the AI last year, who do you think would be AI champions now?
If Berno and Dermo and co. had to squeeze into a few cars around four in the evening, drive to Ballyhaunis or wherever, for a savage bout of training and then get back around 2 or 3 in the morning to get ready for work or study the next day, do you think they'd be half the men they are now?  Mind you, a trip from Belmullet or Ballina or anywhere else in our gawd forsaken county would make men out of a fair few of them. They'd never complain about potholes damaging their top of the range Subarus again. 
In every material and indeed mental way, it's a case of Goliath taking on David every time that Dublin plays.
Talk about a level playing pitch; it's about as level as the backside of The Reek.

[stew]

Cork Ladies. Finally beaten this evening by Mayo who were inspired by Cora. What a team. What a record. Such ambassadors the lot of them. Many of them dual players - their whole lives dedicated to Gaelic games. I'm sounding patronising now, but Jesus, what a group of athletes.

That really is stretching it.

I saw a Cork player being substituted with about seven or eight minutes left.

Whatever she is, she is not an athlete.

Classy siddles, she is an athlete if she is playing inter county football no matter how she looks, I am sure you are gorgeous you ballix!

[johnneycool]

You've spouted this rubbish before. Can you please point me to the critical ladies rugby coverage and the benign ladies football coverage? The GAA coverage is usually less savage as it's amateur and more local but it's bollox to say coverage of ladies GAA is patronising or fawning.

I made a post last year rightly criticising the standard of women's GAA.

Instead of people actually engaging with the reality, people just went into a huff and embarrassed themselves in their reactions.

I can point you to the critical coverage of women's rugby. It was on RTE's live coverage of the recent World Cup where Fiona Steed and Lynne Cantwell provided extensive expert analysis. They didn't spare any feelings and treated the event as a serious sporting competition with analysis befitting of such, which made the whole thing a much better spectacle for the viewer. I've never seen that happen with women's GAA.

Malachy Clerkin made this point in a column.

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/rugby/international/rt%C3%A9-panel-s-forensic-analysis-good-for-irish-women-s-rugby-1.3185259

With women's GAA we get nothing but plamasing which treats the viewer as a child - we don't get serious analysis, we get guff from Des Cahill and Cyril Farrell refusing to ever point out the shocking mistakes which so regularly happen, we get the nonsense of "they train just as hard as the men" and "that was better than the vast majority of men's matches".

All they're missing is sticking a little star on the players chests and giving them a pat on the head as if they were at a kid's summer camp.

They still wear skirts in camogie, for fook's sake.

No they don't.