There was a time when Liam Dunne spent a lot of his day flicking through the teletext. His left leg was encased in plaster and the television became as much of a crutch as the infernal things they'd given him in the hospital when bidding him adieu. One day last week, Dunne was sitting in the living room of his rented house in Raheenduff, Wexford, the zapper back in his hand, and something caught his eye.

It concerned a footballer with Bradford City in the English League who had received £1 million in compensation for exactly the same injury that Dunne, former All-Star, had sustained in a club hurling match. Two different worlds. Dunne, Wexford hurler, shook his head and remembered the days when his only income was a miserable cheque from the inadequate GAA injured players' scheme and he wondered from where the next penny would come. Hard times for a young married man with a baby on the way and a temporary work contract.

"Good luck to your man, but I honestly believe the GAA should treat each case on its own merit. Each injury is different, each situation deserves to looked at separately," he says. But there is no bitterness. Liam Dunne is one of those souls who loves hurling, loves the camaraderie and the spirit, and the white heat of the championship. He's glad to be back, even if it was a long haul.

Dunne never wondered whether he would have another chance, just expected to play championship hurling again. Back in 1992 he broke his right leg and was back playing in eight weeks with a plate and five pins in it. The second break was more serious. "Bad enough," he says. The reality was that the tibia in his left leg broke into threads and it required a plate and screws and 16 months of recuperation to get him back to the hurling pitch.

Not in time for the last-second goal defeat to Offaly last year, though. He watched that match from beside the dug-out in Croke Park and didn't apologise to anyone for drowning his sorrows afterwards. Rory Kinsella had been on to him to try and make that match his comeback but he wasn't ready.

"I never got the chance after that. Johnny Dooley's goal was a sickener for everyone. It is a cruel game. But it wasn't the first time that something like that has happened to a team in the championship and it won't be the last. You've got to keep going."

Now, this year's championship is looming and everything is in the past. The All-Ireland win, the injury, defeats and 1798. "Everything we've worked on is for the present and the future," says Dunne.

Dunne is a product of a system that lost many good young hurlers, something he considers "frightening". Lounging in the front room of his house which lies adjacent to Phil Redmond's bar and grocery and across the road from the giant warehouse premises of Kevin Cooney, grain merchant, Dunne is surrounded by memento's of his hurling exploits. Photos on the wall, crystal in the cabinet. Proof of his talent, his determination and his survival in a sport that has seen too many fall by the wayside.

"I was looking through a scrapbook the other day of an under-14 county team. I went on as a substitute in the Leinster Final and, do you know, I was the only one in the photograph who went on to play for Wexford seniors," he says.

Another thing crosses his mind. When his club won the Feile na nGael county final in 1981, they went to Galway for the national finals and only two of the players were still hurling when Oulart-The Ballagh won the senior county title in 1994.

Why such a fall-off? Dunne puts it down to the demands that are now placed even on club hurlers, along with emigration and the pressures of studies. He came from a strong sporting background. His dad was involved in the game and his older brothers - Ciaran, Tomas and Sean - were always hurling. Liam, the youngest, was brought up with a hurley in his hand. But he also had that inward motivation, something that his comebacks from injury exemplify. A born survivor.

The demands on players have intensified. When Dunne first sampled inter-county hurling back in 1988 it was a two-night-a-week job. Now, in 1999, the pressures are greater. It's three nights a week, plus Saturdays or Sundays for a match or more training.

"Lads are also watching what they are eating and staying away from the drink too. It has all changed," he says. But he loves hurling. On a chair opposite him lies a tiny hurley with Billy Dunne's name printed on it in thick red marker. Billy the Kid will be two in August and already the tradition is being passed on. "He loves hitting the ball around, but to be honest he's getting to the dangerous stage now. Nothing is safe."

The glow of proud parenthood forgives any unintentional misdemeanours.

The tiny hurley was made by dad, custom-fit for the kid. It's a hobby, not a business, but 10 years spent as a carpenter and joiner with Andy Roche in Blackwater means that working with wood, if not always ash, is in his blood.

His crust these days is made working as an area sales representative with C&C. He'd just joined the company and wasn't even permanent when he sustained his horrendous injury. Seamus Leydon, the former Galway footballer, was his boss there and knew what it was like to be a GAA player and on the injured list. He was more patient that most and Dunne remembers that. Dunne's work takes him around the pubs, clubs and hotels of the south-east.

When he opened the door of his home to me, one of the first remarks thrown at him was about his size. His physical presence on the pitch, or the dressing-room, isn't replicated in his street clothes.

"If I had a pound for every time someone said that to me I'd be a very rich man," he says. And then recalls something that happened a couple of weeks earlier in Furlongs of Curracloe on one of his weekly rounds.

As he walked in the door, one of his clients produced a measuring tape and told him to stand up against the wall. The customers in the pub had been debating his height and the barman reckoned he stood five feet four inches. He was wrong.

"With me, what you see is what you get . . . but I don't mind doing anything like that for a bit of craic and if it gets me a few more sales of Club Orange . . . ." Life is good for the Dunnes of Raheenduff these days. Liam and wife Eithne had their second child, Aoife, nine weeks ago, and when someone tells Liam he has a gentleman's family he replies that he has often been called worse things.

To prove it he lifts the sleeve of his Wexford team fleece jacket and shows the rainbow bruises on his left arm, the legacy of a recent argument with a Waterford player in a challenge game.

During the week, the foundations were put down for his new house a mile up the road beside the hurling pitch. It'll be ready shortly after All-Ireland hurling final time. Life's on the up.

For Liam, though, and the rest of the Wexford team, the past few months have been spent preparing for the championship and the upcoming match with Dublin. He disagrees with those who picture it as a cakewalk.

"I remember back in 1994 we underestimated them and were 11 points down and should have been beaten but got a second chance. In the championship, you can't afford to take anything for granted. Sure Laois should have caught Kilkenny last year."

It'll just be good for Dunne, centre-half back supreme, to be back hurling in the championship again. When he made his reappearance in the National League against Kilkenny it was his first real test.

"I was hoping and praying that the ball wouldn't come to me, but I did fine except for one incident. I went to handpass the ball to Rod (Guiney) and DJ (Carey) intercepted 40 or 50 yards out. How many forwards can punish you for that? But DJ made me feel like a right fool. Still, it is better that it happens in the league than the championship."

That day, one of his old foes, John Power (a good friend off the pitch), made an appearance as a second-half substitute. "Howya, John?" asked Dunne.

"Howya, Liam?" asked Power. And then they got stuck into it. "I'd rate John as one of the hardest centre-half forwards to mark," he says, "but Declan Ryan of Tipperary is a number six's nightmare. It is a nightmare marking him, and still it is great to see him playing so well again."

Kilkenny's shadow hangs over everything that Wexford aspire to. "You'd spend an hour hating them, but you would have an awful lot of respect for them," says Dunne. "It is up to our lads to focus on 1999. There is a thin line between winning and losing and defeat is not accepted very easily by our supporters, or the team, any more.

"That thin line reminds me of what happened Limerick. They were very close to being regarded as one of the greatest hurling teams of all time. They were only a puck of the ball away, but it was still too far. That's a lesson for everyone."

Wexford at least got to win the McCarthy Cup, and Dunne is convinced they have it in their hands to do so again if enough players want it.

"I was listening to the local radio a few weeks ago and someone remarked that we were an old team. Maybe it is time for some of the younger lads like Rory McCarthy and Larry Murphy to take the can."

Indeed, many of the Wexford players have been around for a long time. Dunne himself made his championship debut in 1988, but didn't figure in the following year's campaign. Back then, if you were outside the substitutes, you were given a job as a hurley carrier and that didn't suit Dunne. He refused and wasn't picked for 1989.

For the past few weeks and, if all goes to plan, for the next few months, too, Wexford's training routine has switched from the heavy work to speed and stickwork and head work, that psychological element of the game that plays such an important part in modern hurling. For the past few weeks, he has also been the butt of jokes of the ABUs around Wexford. A committed Man United supporter, he fulfilled one of his sporting dreams when he went to Old Trafford for a FA Cup match last season when still on crutches.

He won't get a chance to fulfil one of his sporting ambitions, a visit to the Cardiff Arms Park. They've pulled it down, but he has promised himself a trip to the new national stadium there some time for an international match between Wales and Ireland.

Such sporting ecumenism, however, won't extend to his championship opponents (at least for 70 minutes on each occasion) this summer. After all he has been through, Dunne is determined to scale hurling's heights again.

"When you have experienced what it is like to win an All-Ireland once, you would hate to go through your career without doing it again."