Can anyone get past this team?

Hurling Championship 2005: No matter how many people Keith Duggan asks, the answer is always the same - it's going to be one hell of a job trying to stop Kilkenny this year.

The sound of trumpets for the 2005 All-Ireland hurling championship is accompanied by the resigned feeling that, despite the best efforts of other suitors, it must be Kilkenny and Cork all over again. With 57 All-Irelands divided between them in the history of the competition, there is nothing new in that.

Last year, the southerners got their noses in front in the all-time honours race in what was a memorable adieu to Donal O'Grady's brief and forceful reign. As summer looms, Brian Cody's Kilkenny are favourites to restore parity at 29 championships each in that private tussle for total supremacy.

Then will come an old-fashioned race against time, like the Russians and Americans vying for supremacy in space travel, to see which of the counties will be the first to land 30 championships.

Since last September, Cork have been going about their business in the low-key, secretive ways that often suit All-Ireland champions, preparing for a difficult Munster championship semi-final against a promising Waterford team whose best shot has possibly already passed by.

Many neutral observers would dearly like to see the McGraths, Paul Flynn and the terse, electric John Mullane realise Waterford's 44-year wait for an All-Ireland. The county is alone among the established hurling strongholds in not experiencing the joy of that release in the modern era.

But such was the formidable manner of Kilkenny's reinstatement as league champions at Clare's expense in Thurles that the months ahead have taken on a black and amber tint once again.

Thurles folk hosted that occasion with preoccupations of their own. Despite their mournful "famine" period from 1971 to 1987, when Tipperary were suddenly and inexplicably locked within the borders of Munster, the reputation acquired through decades of steadfast know-how earned them recognition as part of hurling's untouchable dynasty along with Cork and Kilkenny. But they open their 2005 campaign against Limerick amidst sombre expectations.

"I think many Tipperary people will go to that game to see which of the teams is the fourth-best county in Munster," says Séamus J King, the hurling historian who has just released the final part of a comprehensive trilogy on Tipperary hurling. "And that is a very pessimistic outlook for a Tipperary man.

"Faith and hope in Tipperary is probably not as strong as it used to be and the old certainties of dominance aren't there. After we won the All-Ireland final in 1989 and got over that so-called famine, most of us thought it was a blip. But after 1991, we waited another 10 years for an All-Ireland and doubts have crept in."

After last week's league final, King met Dick Walsh - one of four Dick Walshes from Tullaroan but distinguished by 87 years of excellent health and the memory of hurling with Lory Meagher. Like many spectators, they began talking of Kilkenny and how the robust state of the game in the county could well cause hurlers in other counties to despair.

And they were in agreement that while the present Kilkenny team seem nigh invincible when operating at full force, it is neither a good thing nor a bad thing for the welfare of hurling as a sport. It is merely a fact.

"There will be peaks and valleys," King said, referencing what is often regarded as Tipperary's era of splendour between 1960 and 1968, when the county claimed seven Munster and four All-Ireland titles.

The curious thing about that era, however, is that Kilkenny claimed the laurels in 1962, 1967 and 1969, which hardly represented a decade in the wilderness. Kilkenny's longest spells without All-Ireland success were between the 1947 and 1957 All-Irelands and following the break-up of the 1982/'83 vintage, which led to another nine-year gap until the team that swept the land in 1992 and 1993 came of age.

Both those fallow periods coincided with healthy competition in the Leinster Championship with Wexford and Dublin excelling in the middle part of the century and Offaly enjoying an iron grip on the province through the dark decade, with victories in 1980, '81, '84, '85, '88 and '89 (and also 1990). The thought of any county other than Kilkenny compiling such a streak is inconceivable in the present climate and Offaly prepare for their championship opener against their illustrious rivals with a mix of stoicism and black humour.

The recent decision by Brian Whelahan to take his leave of the game served to symbolise that the good times have passed on.

"There is a very good Kilkenny team there right now, but I don't know if they are greater than that 1992 or 1993 team," maintains Michael Duignan, a member of the charismatic Offaly hurling team of the 1990s that seemed to have the Indian sign over their black-and-amber contemporaries.

"There is a pessimism out there and none of that is Kilkenny's fault. Other teams have fallen back. They had just maintained the form. Going back to 1980, when we made the breakthrough, Offaly teams hurled against Kilkenny without feeling intimidated.

"That was the case when the minor team I played on beat them in 1986. Now, it is very difficult to see anything other than Kilkenny success in Leinster this year and Offaly has probably slipped back. But look, we had nothing for 100 years and then we had a great 20 years and I think we will see players coming through here again before too long.

"And hurling is an unpredictable game. That is why Offaly beat Cork in the 2000 All-Ireland semi-final. I don't believe that counties like Galway and Tipperary and Clare and Waterford don't have at least one big performance in them this summer. It is far from certain."

That would be music to Brian Cody's ears. One of the difficulties the Kilkenny manager faces is the often-voiced impression that Kilkenny are home and dry before a single ball has been hurled. He has preached until beetroot in the face that the horizon is as cloudy for Kilkenny as for any other county and can call upon games against Galway in 2001 and Wexford last year and the All-Ireland final against Cork as proof.

Kilkenny do lose, only less often than other counties, and one of Cody's greatest virtues has been his ability to coerce and marshal a squad into maintaining a mood of hyper-competitiveness through the seasons.

And because so many players are pushing for first-15 places, keeping a calm and uniform outlook in such a potentially combustible environment is far from an easy feat.

"Brian Cody gave them steel," reckons Dinny Cahill, the Antrim manager. "He is responsible for a lot of it. And people forget that Cork took an awful beating from Galway in Thurles in 2002. Donal O'Grady came along and got a lot of those lads in the right frame of mind again. That is not easily done."

In January, Cahill bought a jeep and has worked up 22,000 miles in the bare five months since, driving to and from training in the North. During the week, he left Kilruane at about two in the afternoon and made it home about 12 hours later. This weekend, he is sequestered in the north for an intense weekend training session.

The Tipperary man is a bit like Scott heading into the Antarctic, for as well as devoting his time to Antrim for the past couple of seasons, he gives coaching seminars across Ulster. Recently, he spotted a natural hurler at a clinic in Strabane, a kid whose otherwise excellent performance was marred by three poorly struck goal chances.

Cahill talked to him afterwards and noticed his hurley was about three inches too long for him. That seemed symptomatic of the absence of small details against which the lesser lights of the game are struggling to make an impact.

His time in Belfast has given him a deep appreciation of the efforts made to keep the sport alive in a city where "people have been killed for just having a hurley in their possession".

Just last week, ayoungster was picked up by the PSNI for having a hurley, or what was termed an offensive weapon. Like many hurling people, Cahill has a lot of ideas about how the sport could make an effective breakthrough in the top half of the country.

He acknowledges there is a prevailing mindset across the Ulster belt that hurling is something innate to places like Cork and Kilkenny and the other southern counties, that it is about bloodlines. And it is a notion he wants to smash.

"Seán Óg Ó hAilpín is the most obvious response to that. A guy that could play any sport. And that is common. When Borrisokane won the vocational title in Nowlan Park, they had a tremendous young player called Philip Austin at midfield. His parents are Church of Ireland, no hurling background whatsoever. It is not something that has to be passed through generations."

An All-Ireland quarter-final place is what Antrim are aiming for this summer - a chance to play in Croke Park and measure themselves against the elite counties, preferably avoiding the Howitzer threats presented by Kilkenny and Cork.

Then back to the league to try to build more points and more confidence. Where Antrim are, other counties only dream. Shane Brick made a splash with his scoring exploits for Kerry over the past couple of years and is looking forward to the inaugural Christy Ring tournament this summer as something vastly preferable to the annual mauling at the hands of one of the heavyweight counties in the Munster championship.

In UCC, Brick played alongside guys like Tom Kenny and Tommy Walsh and admits he sometimes got a little envious of the sense that they seemed destined to walk a path to greatness.

"They would have an understanding of what we were trying to do in Kerry," Brick says. "But really, the game they play is light years beyond the game here. That is just the way it is."

Brick's parish of Kilmoyley is as fastidious in its devotion to hurling as the Amish community in its fondness for simplicity, and it is at club level that Kerry hurling has most impressed, competing handsomely against luminaries such as Blackrock of Cork in recent years.

The one bright summer occasion that he experienced in a Kerry jersey was against Limerick, when 4,000 people showed up in Tralee and the home team led until the last 20 minutes of the match.

That day was like a glimpse of what could be possible, but the feeling was so brief as to be lonely. And only four of the Kerry team who played that day have stuck it out in the mean time.

"It gets demoralising all right, taking these heavy beatings. That is why the Christy Ring tournament has to work. But it will need backing and exposure and, hopefully, the name that is associated with it will guarantee that. The thing is, though, that everyone knows that it is not the most glamorous competition so we are going to have to fight to make it a success."

That fight is what Nickey Brennan, the GAA president-elect, feels all counties are going to have to show in order to emulate and eclipse the elite counties.

Brennan has long demonstrated an egalitarian attitude in trying to develop hurling across the land and can understand why the perpetual strength of his native Kilkenny might frustrate other counties.

"But it comes back to the work that goes in here all through the primary schools. There is a passion for it and I would like to think it could be replicated in other counties. Look, they have set the standard and it is up to other counties to try and match it. And it does happen and it will happen again.

"I just don't believe that there are counties out there telling themselves that there is no point to this year's All-Ireland, that it is just going to be Kilkenny or Cork.

"I don't believe it."