Paul Fitzpatrick
He may be widely regarded as the heir apparent to handball king Paul Brady but young Cork sensation Killian Carroll will have to wait another year at least for a first Irish senior title after he was ruled out of this year's championship due to injury.
The draws for the O'Neill's Sportswear 40x20 Senior Singles Handball championship have been released and the big news is that the 21-year-old, whose astonishing reflexes have wowed the handball world for the last 18 months, will not take his place after picking up an elbow strain.
Carroll, the reigning Irish Nationals and Canadian Nationals champion, was expected to have a major say in the destination of this year’s title, having been beaten by eventual champ Robbie McCarthy in a close third game in the 2014 semi-final.
Carroll, who also won the Boston Open last year, is regarded as the next superstar of the game but the way seems clear now for last year's champion Robbie 'The Buzzsaw' McCarthy to advance to another final.
McCarthy, who has qualified for the last eight by virtue of his Leinster Championship win last month, is seeded no 1 and will be strongly fancied to make the last four, where his likely opponent will be Connacht champion Joe McCann or last year’s semi-finalist Brian Carroll of Meath.
Former Clare underage hurler Diarmaid Nash, meanwhile, leads the lower half of the draw as the no 2 seed. He faces a tough path, though, through one of the deepest draws in years if he is to repeat last season's run to the final.
Former champion Eoin Kennedy of Dublin will be favoured to come through to the quarters, where veteran Michael Finnegan – who took a game from Armagh's Charly Shanks in the Ulster final – lies in wait. The winner of that section plays into Nash while Shanks, for his part, will have to fend off one of lefties Niall O’Connor and Vinny Moran or Galway hot shot Martin Mulkerrins in the other section.
The frustrating thing for fans is that the only Irishman - aside from the peerless Brady, who has stepped away from 'domestic' singles play - to beat McCarthy in the last 12 months was Carroll. The way seems clear for the 28-year-old Mullingar soldier to go all the way once again but the field is so closely-grouped that this could well be one of the tightest races in history.
;Meanwhile, reigning champion Aisling Reilly heads the field in the Ladies Singles. The Antrim right-hander scored a straight games win over Cork’s Catriona Casey in last year’s decider at Kingscourt but Casey has since turned the tables on her great rival at the US Nationals in Minneapolis, the US Open in LA and the Irish Nationals in Kilkenny.
