In just over a week's time, inter-county GAA returns in earnest with the start of the Allianz Hurling Leagues.
The following weekend, the first football league fixtures get underway with that particular code undergoing a restructure with the advent of eight loosely geographically-defined groupings rather than the traditional four divisions due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the calendar.
With championship action just around the corner after the leagues completion, it will be interesting to see how counties approach the upcoming phase of action.
Former Limerick All-Ireland-winning hurler Shane Dowling and former Dublin star Ciarán Whelan joined the RTÉ GAA Podcast to discuss the 2021 leagues and the contrast between hurling and football on that front.
"The league is going to be an interesting dynamic," Whelan said of the football side of the coin, before touching on how teams if varying status will approach the coming weeks.
"It is going to be used for championship preparation. But if you're a young lad getting a chance, it's going to be a massive game for you and you're getting a chance to nail your colours to the mast.
"But you've got to think that the bigger teams that have championship ambitions are looking further ahead and will be training probably through the league programme and using it to experiment and get game-time into as many players as possible.
"Particularly, if you look at Division 1, and it's an awful pity there's four northern teams (in Division 1 North), it's like a mini-Ulster Championship up there isn't it, then they have a tough road ahead of them... it's regrettable that there is an imbalance up there because the Ulster Championship, as we know, is a lot tougher for them.
"And then on the flipside of that, you look at the Leinster Championship and you're kind of saying that there are teams that are trying to progress and their league status is hugely important, and you could have some teams and managers thinking, 'Yeah, I'm going into the Leinster Championship and if I'm lucky enough I might get lucky enough to be hammered by the Dubs at some point'.
"Obviously, Offaly and Louth has an interesting dynamic to it. You have John Maughan and Mickey Harte. Yeah there are going to be some good games.
"But you just wonder with the teams that are in Division 3 and Division 4 and thinking ahead to the split competitions like the Tailteann Cup, the league is going to be quite important for them.
"Definitely at the top end, I think you're going to see a lot of shadow-boxing. It will probably be a little bit farcical maybe at times. I think the way managers will approach it, I think they might approach one or two of the games where they're looking to get a performance, put their best lads out but definitely experiment in some of the other games.
"So you won't be able to read too much into the league at all."
Meanwhile, Dowling offered an insight on how All-Ireland hurling champions Limerick are building into these coming weeks of league action.
"I'd say Limerick were doing a lot less than most counties were and I think that's where John Kiely to be fair has been very, very good is that there is a trust among the players," he said.
"He knows that they're going to go away and they're going to do their own gym work, their own bit of running and they weren't tied down to doing five sessions a week since February.
"So it was only a month before they knew inter-county teams we're going to come back that - I won't say a bit of pressure was applied but things were stepped up a small bit and more structure was put to their training week.
"So by the time they got back in, they were in relatively good shape. But at the end of the day, if you're going training on your own or with one other person, running around a field or whatever it was, to going back in and trying to do hard, game-based drills, there's no comparison.
"So they're going to have to incrementally build that up and I think that's what they're doing. This week even will probably be as tough a week as they've had but then next week they're getting ready to face Tipperary.
"But usually coming up to games, you'd taper your training week and the load would come down. But I don't think the load is going to come down this year because they can't afford for it to come down because they haven't got enough time.
"So I think sessions right up to championship will be as intense whereas in previous years the night before championship mightn't be as bad - bad in terms of how hard it is - but I think this year is going to go straight through to championship."
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