It was a weekend of sporting shocks.  Leicester City went five points clear at the top of the Premier League with nine games to go.  Waterford beat Tipperary in Thurles in the Allianz National League for the first time since 1998, And in Las Vegas in the early hours of Sunday morning the Conor McGregor freight train hit a bump on the rails that may yet derail him.

Whichever of those three you think was the must stunning may well say much about your age or your view of world sport but all three can be seen as indicative of the fact that part of sport’s beauty is its unpredictability.  The fact that on any given day anybody is capable of an upset.

The Premier League teams being shown the way by Leicester have responded, albeit not immediately as a result of Ranieri’s upsetting the apple cart, with talk of the potential restructuring of the Champions’ League to a more full time place on the calendar.  It may well be that in ten years time or less that the halcyon days of the League being the premier competition for football clubs and fans will be a distant memory.  Things do change.

In the GAA, the Allianz Leagues have continued their climb up the ranks of importance and it is in the potential for an upset that its greatest charms lie.  Dublin against Cork in August will attract four times the crowd that was at Croke Park on Saturday night but in ten years again that gap will be narrower.  Playing against the best teams in the country is a more competitive spectacle that many of the early rounds of the summer All Ireland Championships and while the quality of Kerry vs Donegal may have lacked a little, the raw nature of the battle and the clear importance to both teams is perhaps another marker of how the GAA season balance may tilt as well.

In Las Vegas there was a sense that this was just a stop along the way for Conor McGregor.  There was little expectation of a defeat against a fighter who had been dragged away from training for a triathlon and who came into this contest with a ‘soft body’ in McGregor’s words.

It didn’t look so soft near 6am local time here when a left hook rocked the Irish fighter and left him beaten and subdued, albeit not for long.

Those words in the immediate aftermath suggested that McGregor is more than a mouth, and that his apparent disregard for the sport and indeed the world outside himself is more show than reality.

He bounced back with braggadocio 12 hours later and the hype has already begun for his next fight, an actual title defence in July but all of a sudden the stakes are higher now.

A second defeat would take him off the lofty perch he currently hangs onto within UFC.  His fans have remained faithful in the aftermath of this but Irish fans across all sports are notoriously fickle.  Victory means a chance to cheer and celebrate but defeat is hollow and needs to be replaced by another buzz, whether in rugby, soccer, mixed martial arts or the Olympics.

We follow success and that has been a big part of McGregor.  He can bounce back, just as Tipperary and Manchester United will as well.  But he is no longer invincible and that cannot be turned back.