GAELIC GAMES: Donal O'Grady has put Limerick hurling's house in order with his customary smooth approach and tomorrow they face Dublin in an unusually calm frame of mind, writes KEITH DUGGAN

AND HERE they are: the emerald green hurling county that everyone had forgotten about. Dublin have been such a vibrant and colourful element of the present hurling season that it is only now that Limerick’s low-key revival can be fully appreciated.

Is tomorrow’s quarter-final between the counties really a straight forward clash between the high-rolling league champions and a Division Two team? Or does it bring together the unsteady, novice power that Dublin have become against a county that has wrestled with the might of its own tradition as much as with other counties?

No hurling county has been as turbulent and trouble-strewn as Limerick over the past 20 years and no county has been as unlucky.

1994 is a long time ago, and an entire generation of Limerick hurlers has passed through the dressingroom since, but the chaotic last five minutes of that year’s hurling final played havoc with the Limerick hurling temperament for years. And there was always the sense that it was governed by a kind of instability and pulling in different directions.

Then, after the nightmare of last season, when Justin McCarthy led a shadow squad through league and championship, someone came up with the Eureka moment of asking Donal O’Grady to put the house in order.

And from the first whistle, there hasn’t been a peep out of Limerick.

They have played, sometimes well and sometimes averagely, but always hard and they will show up against Dublin tomorrow as outsiders but in a strong frame of mind. It is as much as any Limerick follower could have asked from the Cork man.

“Oh, Donal has been vital to this, no question,” says Eamon Cregan, Limerick’s talisman in their last All-Ireland win in 1973 and coach of several senior teams, including the luckless group of 1994.

“They have been stable and there has been leadership. I believe that in the last number of years leadership was lacking. Maybe it is the curse of St Munchin: the outsider will always flourish in Limerick. But Donal is a man who has no axe to grind.

“For too long too many players felt that they don’t need to learn anything and in the game of hurling every day you learn something new. Donal has proven himself on and off the field. He is a figure of respect. His teaching background has helped as well. After last year’s debacle, this was badly needed.”

O’Grady’s appointment made sense from the Limerick perspective but the Cork man faced into an unpromising situation. Relegated to Division Two and leading a hurling county demoralised by the immediate aftermath of the split that occurred during McCarthy’s period in charge and the enduring sense that the three All-Ireland Under-21 titles Limerick won had come to nothing, he was hardly taking over a squad filled with promise.

His approach was much the same as he adopted with his native Cork when he took over the county senior team in 2003. So smooth-running was the O’Grady era that the turbulence and dissatisfaction of 2002 – when a dishevelled looking Cork team were easily beaten by Galway – was quickly forgotten. His credentials were strong – club hurling All-Ireland medals with St Finbarr’s football teams in 1980 and 1981, club hurling medals in 1975 and 1978 and a senior All-Ireland medal from 1984 and principal in one of the stars of the Cork schools sports firmament, North Monastery. O’Grady was a peculiar mix of cast-iron self-belief and modesty.

“I was surprise to be asked at the time,” he said in 2003 of his appointment as Cork manager. “I didn’t think I would be in the running really. I’d say that there were people asked before me. But it is a voluntary position and there probably wasn’t too many people up for it either. My whole brief was to concentrate on the hurling side of it.”

The perception was that Cork had talent but needed direction and O’Grady’s impact was swift: they lost a hotly-contested All-Ireland final against Kilkenny in his first season and beat the same opposition to reclaim the MacCarthy Cup in 2004.

That October, O’Grady stepped down, much to the regret of both the Cork County Board and the group of players – about the only thing that those bodies ever saw eye to eye on.

“He is single-minded and wouldn’t suffer fools gladly,” Jimmy Barry Murphy, his team-mate with St Finbarr’s and Cork, said at the time.

“All players would be treated the same, numbers one to 30. No one would be placed on a pedestal. He’s a fantastic technical coach. I’ve seen it myself. He’d do things until they were got right. He felt that skills had to be practiced again and again. The drills he introduced may have struck players as repetitive and boring but they could quickly see that his way was going to be beneficial.”

O’Grady’s return to the sideline has seen an immediate emphasis on those fundamentals. As the league started, he assiduously prepared for games against teams that were novel to a man of his hurling lineage: Westmeath, Down, Carlow.

Limerick looked impressive on some afternoons and so-so on others. But the attack found a fulcrum in Kevin Downes and they were promoted after an end-of-season tussle against Clare. By the time they played Waterford in the Munster semi-final, they looked like a Division One side that day, beaten only by an assassin’s goal from John Mullane in the dying seconds.

But that defeat might have marked O’Grady’s finest hour and certainly delivered the best line of the hurling season. Standing on the edge of the pitch after a frantic and enthralling game, O’Grady was asked where Limerick hurling stood now. “In the qualifiers,” he grinned.

And that was it: there were no excuses or whinging, just an acceptance of the next task.

In retrospect, given the trimming Tipperary meted out to Waterford in the Munster showpiece, perhaps Limerick were as well off to avoid exposure to the All-Ireland champions in a mood for scores. They have ended up where they set out to be – in a quarter-final. In just a few months, the mood in Limerick has been transformed. The danger is that people might see O’Grady’s effect as somehow making everything all right.

“Donal O’Grady has shown us a way of how to get the players moving in the right direction,” Cregan says. “But he can’t change the attitude of the club members. It is up to us to try and attain the standards that we have not reached for a long long time.

“The goodness of what he has done will trickle into clubs so we can forget this narrow attitude that we have in Limerick. This old charade. We have had one All-Ireland since 1940 and that is an indictment of the whole system in Limerick.

“The GAA is a very political organisation and people tend to forget all the little things that go on. Donal has no political motivation and all he wants is the team that he is in charge of doing well. The team representing Limerick must come first and too many people forgot that. And they must respect the person in charge.

“This is a man who came in and they had to respect him because he knew an awful lot more than any of the players who are playing or anyone in the county. There are only four people in Limerick who have experience of winning an All-Ireland or who have been involved with winning an All-Ireland.

“Outside of that group would have no experience of how to run the thing and must be willing to learn. You must widen your mind and be willing to learn. If not, we are going nowhere. We need to end the codology that has gone on within Limerick for I don’t know how many years.”

In the past, Limerick hurling has been a story about unexpected bursts, particularly in 2007 when they ended up in an All-Ireland final against Kilkenny. But too many managers passed through and too many players came and left for the set-up to ever feel stable.

That is what O’Grady has brought along with the insistence of punctuality and an attention to stickwork. There is a calmness about Limerick. They are no longer the story and that suits them just fine. In fact, the irresistible rise of the Dublin hurlers has been the story that has dominated the hurling season.

It allows Limerick to travel to Thurles with barely a whisper, which is just how they like it.

“It’s going to be a different ball game, a real step up,” says Cregan. “But it is a fascinating game.”