LockerRoom: Not one of those columns about nothing. I swear. It's just that when you get up late and leave home on Sunday morning without a word written and then realise throw-in is at 2.30 and not an hour later, well, you're behind from the throw-in. So.

So. You probably don't want to hear this but for me it could be therapeutic, so I'm going to bend your ear anyway. On the way to Thurles yesterday I got a geyser of blood in the head and took the Lisheen Mines exit instead of going on to Two Mile Borris and taking the right turn there. Yes, I'm a fool.

I can see you shaking your head already. This will be a column more to be pitied than laughed at.

Well, so be it. No sooner had the siren of the Lisheen short-cut sung her song and seduced me than the skies darkened and it began raining stair rods and I found myself reflecting on the most salient statistic of my journalistic career so far, which is that I have spent 32 per cent of those bad years lost. Not vocationally lost (I take your point, though) but actually physically lost.

The happiest moment I have had was arriving an hour early for an interview with Brian Kerr. The unhappiest was realising that the Spa Hotel in Lucan, in whose car park I was happily sitting, was not the same deal as the Spawell in Templeogue. Not remotely. It was two more hours before I found the Spawell in Templeogue. Not Brian Kerr's happiest time either but he kindly pretended I'd allowed him an extra hour to "think about stuff". Mainly stuff about journalists, I imagine.

(While we're at it though, what's with southside Dubliners and the KCR? If you're lost anywhere within a five-mile radius of the dreaded Kimmage-Crumlin Roundabout they instruct you to return to the goddamn KCR and start again as if the font of all geographic wisdom resides there. They well know in their dark hearts that the KCR is just a roundabout with 79 roads off it, all of which look the same.)

Anyway, yesterday I was brimful of confidence about the Lisheen Mines gambit, having, admittedly in the reassuringly elderly presence of the GAA Correspondent, taken that route just seven days previously to see Limerick and Tipp in Thurles.

I should have known better. In the past I've come to grief badly with little episodes like the retracing of the Imaginary Back Road Around Monasterevin and my attempt to discover the So Called Short-cut to Derry.

The confidence lasted until I found myself U-turning quickly in the stingy confines of a farmyard, with an elderly lady peeping out from behind the lace curtain wondering how she'd feed such a fat visitor Sunday dinner.

Usually I make it a rule to swing about quickly if I notice that any road I am travelling on has grass growing in the middle but some days you are just too damn cheery, and it was only when I'd flattened a stout-looking hen on the way out (I'm sorry, but it was never going to grow old and go to college and make post-modern jokes about why its children crossed the road, now was it?) that I began to feel the old familiar blind panic.

An hour or so later, back in Rathdowney, I calmed down, did the breathing exercises and started again. Must start a column, says I, and the palpitations began again.

Must say, I love Thurles. Not that the smell of onions frying in Liberty Square isn't an overrated pleasure for somebody trying to drive through the Square two minutes before throw-in, but because the people who run Semple Stadium are so friendly.

There is a suspicion among us that they aren't GAA officials at all, that there has been some kind of quiet revolution and happy local people have taken over.

Thurles is the anti-Clones (don't get me started on getting lost on the way to Clones). You can't get into the car-park in Clones without passing through 76 interrogations, at the final one of which, at the top of the lane tantalisingly overlooking the car-park, a maor grimly informs you that you can't get into the car-park, full stop.

In Clones, GAA passes and NUJ passes are considered the sort of asset Communist Party membership might be to a US presidential candidate - but I digress.

Thurles is fine and dandy. Fellas wave you into the car-park with a big smile and you could arrive at any time and with any sort of makey-up credential and they'd carry you on their shoulders to the press box, which groans and creeks with the pots of tea and the free mineral water and the sandwiches and cake. Really. It's the most hospitality I've seen in a press box since a winter league game I did years ago in Longford and the county pro threw two bottles of whiskey into the press box for the four of us to drink. (Drink driving was considered an art then. Changed times indeed.)

Anyway, we all still had our mouths stuffed with Swiss roll when Joe Deane scored the first Cork goal. Waterford have made a habit now of giving Cork the tribute of a soft goal at the start of each game between them so we just shrugged.

The Cork crowd, who seem to spend a lot of time watching Sky Sports (what, in this the Year of Culture?) took to chanting Deano, Deano (later there would be outbreaks of You're Not Singing Anymore) and indeed you have to admire Deano. There was a moment in the first half when he struck a ball, a wide from back on his own 65-yard line, and you looked down at him, a corner forward drawn back deep as all those behind him handpassed to infinity, and him carrying what looks like a 32-inch stick with a frying pan on the end instead of a bos and he driving the ball Poc Fada-type distances while there's clattering and clamour going on all around him.

That wide of Joe's came just when the game was at its craziest and most beautiful. Half-time calmed it and the pulse never recovered. Neither did Waterford. They played some of their finest hurling before heading in for tea but it was one of those afternoons when they wanted John Mullane to burst into life, but Mullane looked like a man who had spent a year thinking about the full 70 minutes he would play against Cork and the discipline he would show and the damage he would do. It never came for him and in the second half when he picked a few loose ones the Cork backs were covering like fire blankets.

The margin never gets out of hand but really it's over before it's over. Waterford are down to Paul Flynn frees to keep them in touch. The Cork backs have composed themselves and are working steadily. Niall McCarthy has put a crimp in Ken McGrath's day with his third and fourth points from play.

Waterford out of the Munster Championship and taking the short-cut through Lisheen to an All-Ireland final? It might be no harm to go the long way and not have the whole great, gilded balloon of Munster hurling hanging over them for a summer. With Flynn and McGrath getting sharper as the summer goes on, who knows? They did enough yesterday to suggest that maybe the summer isn't a two-team procession.

For the rest of us, it ended yesterday with the usual headlong rush for the tunnel to squeeze the quotes. Again Thurles. A garda puts his hand on my chest just as the darkness of the tunnel is about to swallow me. "Where are you going?" he asks aggressively. "It's okay. Press, press, press," shout a chorus of maors as they drag the garda away and haul him before a complaints commission.

Finished work around six. Home around two in the morning. Don't think that short-cut up through Athy really works.