The sports-photographer Ray McManus has been shooting GAA championship summers for over 40 years now, but the weekend just gone was one like no other.

He and his Sportsfile team of photographers were busy, but not capturing the sort of action they would have imagined when the championship master fixture-list was first drawn up.

The COVID-19 shutdown ensured the first really busy weekend of the championship summer never went ahead, but the Sportsfile photographers still made their way to a number of county grounds to capture the GAA shutdown for posterity.

McManus himself pointed his car towards Thurles where he’d arranged a photo-shoot with Semple Stadium Head Groundsman, Dave Hanley.

It’s a journey the experienced photographer has made more times than he can count for championship clashes at the height of summer, but this was a very different experience to the norm.

“It was a bit surreal,” says McManus. “I gave myself an hour and three quarters to get there but it only took an hour and a half there was so little traffic on the road. I'd say I drove through the whole of Thurles town and I didn't meet ten cars moving.

“Quite often I'd be at Semple Stadium before the main gates would be open but the fact that they never opened (the stadium) until Dave arrived, that was just an unusual experience.

“Because as early as I would be at a match, Dave would always be there already and there would maybe be 50 people inside before anything would happen.”

There might have been no match, but McManus still captured some memorable images.

The pic, literally, of the bunch is the one at the top of this article when he snapped Hanley tying his laces in his work-room in the bowels of the Kinnane Stand. The colours pop despite a lack of natural light.

“I actually did a white-balance inside in the room,” says McManus, explaining his technique for setting up the shot.

“That's why I got a proper natural colour. There was no flash used, I just used available light.

“I used a lens that was made in 1970. It's an old glass lens on the most modern camera. It's a manual focus lens so there wouldn't be much use for it these days.

“But comparing that lens to modern lens is like comparing 40-year-old Waterford Crystal to Cavan Crystal, it's heavy. It's a Nikon lens, so it still fits on the modern camera, and that's why the colour came out so brilliantly.

“I had a mind to take a picture of him having a cup of tea but he just put one foot up on the thing (to tie his lace) and I just called his name and he looked around and I said, 'Bingo! That will do.'

“Now I did take others when he had a fertiliser bucket and was taking out a pitch-fork, but that whole picture I took summed up the whole project.”

The Sportsfile team captured a number of other shots from around the country that will surely be published for years to come to illustrate the strange times we’re currently living through.

One of the best was Harry Murphy’s shot taken from inside the apartment of former Laois hurler, Brian Stapleton, and Johnstownbridge camogie player, Róisín Stapleton, which overlooks an empty MW Hire O’Moore Park.

"Harry rang the Laois press officer and said, 'You know those apartments, would you know anyone living in them apartments because it might make a picture',” says McManus.

“Because when you're at matches in O'Moore Park you'd often see people looking out from those apartments.

“So, we contacted them and they said no bother they'd do it. And even though they were there by appointment, they're just sitting watching the television so it looks very natural. It's not that set-up. It could happen and it did happen.”

There’s a very good chance that Murphy’s snap will feature in the 2020 edition of ‘A Season of Sundays’, Sportsfile’s annual coffee-table book of their best GAA photographs of the year.

There might be less action shots than usual in this year’s edition, but McManus and his team proved over the weekend that the 2020 season can still generate some memorable images.

You can view a number of them in the below gallery.