ANOTHER year comes around for Offaly's hurlers. Only minutes, from last September, separate them from being able to view Sunday's Leinster championship match as the first step towards an All Ireland three in a row. Instead, aspirations are diminished and more than a hint of weariness overhangs the scene.

This year's captain, cornerback Shane McGuckin, responds sharply to the suggestion that the team might be having difficulty concentrating on their match with preliminary round qualifiers Meath. "I'd say we don't consider the gap to be as big as you do. They've beaten us twice, in the League and in a challenge match."

And so they did. In the season before last, a last minute goal by Benny Murray tumbled Offaly to an embarrassing Division Two defeat in Athboy. Although Meath's manager John Davis refers rather dubiously to his team's achievement that day as a win in the muck and the rain", McGuckin played in the match and is keen to put a positive spin on Sunday's opponents.

"We've been struggling since last year and have been focusing on Meath. They're very fit and their forwards are fast, with a very good half forward line. Pat Potterton is a fine player and David Martin played for Leinster this year. The other one, Mickey Cole, I was marking in the League and was impressed by him. They're fully committed and strong.

The recent League was a mixed one for Offaly. They might have been relegated, but qualified for the quarter finals where a dreadful display against Wexford ended their interest. "It was a bad League," says McGuckin. "We struggled all through it, except the first match against Tipperary. If we're missing two or three players and you always are during the League it's a big blow.

"I really felt we'd played badly against Kerry and Galway but we'd done reasonably against Waterford, so it was very disappointing against Wexford. We only got a couple of points in the second half."

As a resident of Gorey, McGuckin found the experience doubly distasteful. "We had beaten Wexford twice since I came down here so they were waiting to have a go."

The shadow of last September's All Ireland final defeat by Clare is still present. In the euphoria that followed what was a widely popular victory, Offaly's disappointment was easy to forget, but it had been a match well within the then champions' grasp. For McGuekin, the final had more immediate connotations.

In the 1994 final, he had been substituted as Damien Quigley gave him the sort of roasting he frequently gives corner backs but with the added distinction, that the Limerick corner forward doesn't usually achieve, of banging in a commensurate tally of scores.

"Personally I felt a lot of pressure after being taken off the previous year. It worked out reasonably well up to the last few minutes. But there was a stage where we looked like we were going to win and had chances for scores that would have finished it off."

Looking back to `94, did he feel resentful that he had been so summarily substituted in the recognisable style of manager Eamonn Cregan instead of being switched to the other corner.

"You don't expect me to answer that," he says. "Your job is to stop your man from scoring and if he gets 2tin half an hour, you're not doing too well."

With the summer season on the horizon, McGuckin says that the years are taking a toll even if the side isn't particularly old. Lack of playing resources has placed perennial demands on the same hurlers.

"We're hoping that things have picked up and maybe they have a little bit. We didn't play many challenge matches, so it's hard to know. We're not as keen as in `94. There's a lot of mileage up. But when the championship starts again and you see other teams beginning to play, it brings on the appetite a bit.

Already Cork have exited this year's championship. Like many, McGuckin was surprised by the margin rather than the fact of Limerick's success. "I was very impressed by Limerick. They played as well as they have in the last two years. I thought it would be hard to call, that it'd be closer than that. There was a lot fancied Cork for the All Ireland. We had played Limerick in a challenge and it was obvious they were going well."

Cork, like all who lose in the championship, won't have another competitive inter county match for at least nine months due to the restructuring of the National Hurling League. McGuckin has mixed feelings on both that change and the championship experiment of readmitting losing finalists.

"I'd welcome the shorter season, but I see problems with club matches. They'll have to be played either midweek or on Saturday. The championship changes I think are going to benefit the stronger hurling counties who'll be getting to the All Ireland stages every year and the longer they go through the summer, the better they get. It would be very disheartening for us to have to play Kilkenny in an All Ireland final, having already beaten them."

(It was actually pointed out by some people that such a scenario represented Offaly's best chance of winning an All Ireland as it would harness the galvanic effect Kilkenny seem to have on them, in both Leinster and All Ireland finals.)

As for the captaincy, McGuckin is characteristically understated. "I was a bit surprised to be made captain. But once the game starts, you play your own game. I don't really think about it."

You don't patrol the pitch roaring at fellas?

No."