2010 NATIONAL HURLING LEAGUE: Keith Duggananalyses the current state of hurling as the National League gets underway tonight when Tipperary and Kilkenny reprise their magnificent All-Ireland final meeting of last September

THE HURLING season begins in earnest tonight with the usual symphony of anxiety and unrest in the background. In Thurles, Tipperary play Kilkenny, a humdinger of a match with which to open the new league season and a pertinent reminder of the quality and drama of last year’s All-Ireland final.

Under Brian Cody, Kilkenny did a brilliant job of downplaying the general fixation with their winning record until the fourth All-Ireland title on the trot had duly been achieved last September. But the main point of this year’s action revolves around Kilkenny’s unprecedented drive for five. The black and amber stage is crowded with bouquets by now.

Hurling aficionados have acknowledged this current Kilkenny side may be the most complete in the rich history of the game and that ought to make this a glorious period for hurling. But for all of the supreme exhibitions that Kilkenny have given, the feeling persists that the old game is not doing so well.

The signs are everywhere.

They were there in the winter putsch that saw Mike McNamara, a dedicated hurling man, exit from the Clare managerial position. They are evident in the latest unhappy situation in Limerick which sees Justin McCarthy, another man who must have left a million stud marks in hurling fields across Ireland, at the centre of a situation which may see Limerick hurling have to do without the vast majority of the best players in the county.

Cork are just recovering after the internal heaves there. Galway have demonstrated great promise under John McIntyre but each summer now places maroon squads under desperate pressure to catch fire. Wexford, a county at the epicentre of a wildly exciting few years in hurling, will start this season in Division Two.

Waterford, the great contenders of the last decade, are waging a war against time now; it seems likely their best chance of an All-Ireland has already passed.

Offaly are back in Division One and their immediate aim is to stay there. They posted the first significant result of the year when they sent Kilkenny packing in the Walsh Cup. It might have been a Kilkenny team shorn of many championship regulars, but any victory over the Cats is worth shouting about.

Offaly play Cork by the Lee tomorrow, a tough opening for a newly promoted and young team. Then they go into Nowlan Park, where the champions will undoubtedly address the Walsh Cup result on the scoreboard. A daunting two weeks lie ahead.

“I’m not sure the game of hurling was invented for February,” says Rory Hanniffy when asked if league hurling is enjoyable. The Birr forward is playing for the 10th season for Offaly this year.

“But in terms of intensity, it is there in the league. Teams that have done well in the league tended to do well in the championship as well so that has dispelled the old reputation the league had for being unimportant. Championship dictates but our immediate aim is to stay in Division One. And going to play Cork means you are guaranteed a tough game.”

The retirement of the flame-haired Wexford goalkeeper Damian Fitzhenry cast many minds back to the three or four years in the 1990s when hurling delivered summer after summer of thrilling and unexpected pyrotechnics.

Those seasons gave a vivid illustration of how the country would respond if hurling became truly democratic and engaged a succession of counties across the land. But the optimism that the balance of hurling power was spreading has largely faded.

Liam Griffin, whose passionate stewardship of Wexford culminated in their glorious 1996 All-Ireland win, finds himself increasingly frustrated at the annual gnashing of teeth over what the GAA must “do” about hurling. Like many hurling people, he has conflicting views about the polished empire that Kilkenny have established over the last decade.

It is true that hurling should be celebrating the ongoing story of a dauntless team. It is true that, in other sports, the apparent invincibility that Kilkenny have achieved would be used as selling point. But Griffin’s big fear is that the system will perpetuate a scenario where Kilkenny will steadily become stronger while most other counties become slowly but significantly weaker.

“There is no question that some of the greatest hurlers that ever played are interspersed on that team. It is great for Kilkenny as a county and it is great to watch them. If Kilkenny come to dominate the national landscape as they have done Leinster for the last 10 years, then it would not be good for anyone, including Kilkenny.

“They would end up devouring themselves because there would be nothing left out there. This year, there is no guarantee that Tipperary will bounce back or that Galway will bounce at all. And after that, it is hard to see any team coming through.”

Last November, Griffin stood in Wexford Park for a gripping Leinster club championship game between Ballyhale Shamrocks, the Leinster champions, and Oulart-the-Ballagh, the best team in Wexford. Here were the rival counties in microcosm and he is convinced that Oulart, who were seconds away from a normal time victory, were largely – and blamelessly – guilty of their own downfall.

“They played very well and were in a position to win the game but there was a lack of confidence about them in the closing minutes which has become symptomatic of Wexford hurling. Ballyhale had great composure and got themselves back into it but I am convinced Oulart should have won that game.”

Griffin thinks that it comes down to the system. If you take a 12-year-old hurler from Kilkenny and a 12-year-old of comparative ability from Wexford, then the Kilkenny youngster will more than likely thrive because he will get more games.

He will play at St Kieran’s college, play minor, play U-21 and play senior; he will be raised in a winning culture in a system where the winners invariably play more games. Meanwhile, the Wexford boy will have long periods of idleness after his college is knocked out of the Leinster schools or his minor team is beaten or his club team exits the championship.

“As well as talent, you need volume,” Griffin says. “You need games. And in our system, the strongest teams get the most games.”

Griffin sometimes thinks the best solution would be for Croke Park to hire in a complete outsider, maybe a slick marketing man from one of the American sports who would look at hurling coldly and objectively and come up with a plan to make it the national treasure in more than just name. It would inevitably mean ripping up much history and tradition. But how happy has history and tradition been to most counties trying to compete in the top tier of hurling, not to mention those many counties where it takes monumental effort just to keep it going?

Griffin does not intend going through with the experiment, but he reckons that if he went to any country in Africa and spent five years coaching Gaelic football to athletes there, he would be able to cobble a team capable of competing in the All-Ireland championship. That would not be so with hurling. He means no disparagement to football; hurling is just infinitely more difficult. The coaching development of the game is painstakingly slow.

“Like trying to plough a field with a spoon,” Griffin says.

Paudie Butler, the national coaching officer, is the man with the spoon. He agrees that spreading the hurling gospel in the top half of the country is a matter of progress by inches.

But he has limited patience for the argument that all counties are wilting in the heat of the Kilkenny blaze.

“I have rarely heard Kilkenny been given a bad rap. Under Brian Cody and the county board, they set out to achieve excellence at every level. The values are so secure there but they are not so common to the rest of the game. Their superstars are also their best team players. Their tackle count, their defence, their work ethic, they play for the team. Players are well looked after. They brought Michael Dempsey from a football background, for instance.

“They got an awful lot of things right quickly and they should reap the rewards. Other counties need to adapt. There are signs that counties are getting their house in order. I have no time for the argument that Kilkenny have raised the bar too high. Get up to it!”

But it is a tough task. In his first season as Wexford manager, John Meyler took his team as far as the semi-finals of the 2006 national league, where Kilkenny ended their interest on a score line of 2-22 to 2-07 – a prelude to their Leinster championship meeting, which the Cats also won handsomely.

“The league was never enjoyable because we had to go out and win games and that meant not being able to try players as I would have liked,” Meyler says now.

“Brian (Cody) can do without the Ballyhale lads over the next few weeks or decide that he needs one new back and forward and try different players out over the league. What Kilkenny have achieved should be celebrated and it should be copied too. They got it right. Go back to the late 1990s and there wasn’t any real gap between Kilkenny and the other counties. That has changed.

“But we are witnessing a fantastic period for one county and a period of crisis for several others. Developing the game is very difficult. I am involved with Kerry at the moment and if you take the Fitzgibbon Cup, there are two Kerry players in that competition and one guy playing “freshers”. We won the All-Ireland minor B championship last year but unless those hurlers get high- quality games, they won’t build on that. Hurling needs a structure that guarantees games where weaker teams get to play against better opposition.”

Rory Hanniffy has observed how the concentration of coaching in Dublin schools has led to the squad of promising metropolitan hurlers now training under Anthony Daly. He worries that Offaly has not been as strong at schools level as it should have been in recent years but is optimistic that, at senior level, they are developing a talented young team. Hanniffy was one of the many hurlers on whom the remarkable years of the mid- 1990s made a strong impression.

He was just a little too young for Offaly’s last great coup in 1998. Since then, the MacCarthy Cup has gone to Kilkenny seven times, Cork four times and Tipperary once.

As Liam Griffin says of the years when Clare, Limerick, Offaly and Wexford set the tone in successive championship summers: “Things just happened. Glamour ties, big fixtures, nail- biting fixtures. Limerick didn’t win an All-Ireland but they contributed hugely to making that period what it was.

“You had people like Ger Loughnane . . . I had the odd run-in with Ger then but there he was making Clare hurling controversies seem more important than the Good Friday Agreement and it was wonderful. The weather was good.

“I remember when we won in ’96, we didn’t hurl one wet day and when we came back to Wexford, there was a full clear moon that night. It was magical but I don’t think we should be looking to try and get back to it either. We need to ask what we can do now, to make it better.”

Griffin is still brimming with ideas. He would like to see more use made out of floodlit venues and to see hurling concentrated in the summer months. He would like to see different seasons for hurling and football in counties where both games flourish. Most of all, he wants to see the teams going places.

One team is. Tonight, the Thurles crowd will applaud onto the field a team who are playing against history now. Kilkenny are on the threshold of something remarkable. Their excellence has been widely praised and acknowledged. But who could blame them if they start to resent the implication that their winning record is somehow bad for the game?

When Kilkenny failed to win an All-Ireland title from 1993 to 2000, there were few tears shed outside the county. The Cats were bit-part players in many of those seasons and, at county board meetings and in the hurling fields, they responded in a way that has left rival counties in various states of disarray. Kilkenny will keep on keeping on until some team responds to the challenge.

This is year five of relentless Kilkenny splendour.

There is one consolation for the hurling fraternity – and for the sporting public at large.

No matter what happens, this is going to be a signature season for the great national game.