Minnows must sink before they swim

LockerRoom: Saturday evening and at something of a loose end we decided, just this once, to set our faces against a night of mindless clubbing and unfulfilling debauchery. We headed instead, like stern pilgrims, to Walsh Park in Waterford, there to do penance for all our sins and for all those of our forebears, writes Tom Humphries.

Of course it was drizzling in the sunny south east and the stand was filled with early birds, so we got wet as we got miserable. And so by sharing in the suffering of the Dublin hurlers we endured enough pain and rheumatism to ensure there'll be no bad karma happening to our families for several generations.

What impressed (apart from the need for John Mullane to get some St Tropez spray-on tan for those turkey-meat legs of his) was the size of the crowd. The new hurling qualifying system has crept up on many people, its workings as complicated, mysterious and unknowable as those of the innards of a personal computer. That the whole thing seems to operate in the deep shadow of big football games doesn't help with the clarity.

Still, Saturday in Walsh Park was convincing in its way. The crowd seeking admission snaked down Keane Road clutching their 20 notes in their fists. Inside, the ground rattled and hummed. Waterford found resistance for 20 to 25 minutes before they kicked the door down, but both sides played like teams who knew it was championship season.

For the Dubs, sadly, championship season is as forlorn a prospect right now as hunting season must be for wild deer, but one assumes prolonged exposure to championship hurling and bad times will bring about some hardiness and cutery down the line (it's just a pity the county had to suspend all club championship hurling for the entire summer, but there you go).

The details of Saturday in Waterford are irrelevant. Following fresh on the successes of the Kilmacud Crokes Féile hurling side and the Dublin minor and under-21 hurlers, Walsh Park was a reminder of how far The Metropolitans (as papers used to call the Dubs when I was young) have still to come.

The qualifiers themselves though suggest that in hurling things are often more fluid than we think and the institution of the system which gives every county more games might hasten the shuffle at the top.

A little self-belief, a little run of confidence, and a county can be back in business, if not winning then at least daydreaming.

The new system certainly gives everyone some business to be getting on with, and in this wait-and-see period it is important to keep reminding ourselves nothing lasts forever, not even the hegemony of superpowers or the suffering of satellite states.

Unfortunately for half the participants in the qualifying groups, there is already a fatalistic air about the nascent championship structure, which can't be doing them much immediate good. At half-time in Walsh Park news came through that Offaly were four points ahead of Clare six minutes into the second half. This bulletin was greeted by a cheer and a hum of discussion as people sought explanations as to how this could be.

The plot for these qualifying groups had been laid out early, hadn't it? Waterford and Clare would pummel Offaly and Dublin. Limerick and Galway would do likewise to Laois and Antrim. Then all the swells would meet up again in the safety of the All-Ireland quarter-finals.

Offaly, as is their wont, briefly demurred on Saturday evening. Had they prevailed, things would have got very interesting but finally, like men doused by chloroform, they succumbed by the width of a point. For the likes of Dublin, Antrim, and even Laois, the process must at times seem like getting a penitential sentence of several years hard labour to be followed by execution.

They endure being the whipping boys within a process designed to get more games into the season and to shoehorn more teams into quarter-finals. Then a couple of them go mano a mano above the gaping trapdoor of the Christy Ring Cup, a stygian depth from which they fear there might be no return.

As the hurling analyst Mick Jagger has noted, however, you don't always get what you want. Sometimes you get what you need. Perhaps the real benefit of the system will be seen in a couple of years' time when a couple of counties have got what they needed.

Teams need momentum and confidence and a turn in the bush leagues might transpire to be just what is required. Among the pretender counties there is much swooning and horror right now at the prospect of a season to be spent playing in the Ring Cup. Demoralising suffering in the big time is said to be infinitely preferable to a summertime of registering good wins in unfashionable places.

We're not so sure. The mere maintenance of status is the enemy of revolution. Any of the sides hovering above the Christy Ring Cup trapdoor are necessarily looking at implementing three-year plans or five-year plans if they are to be genuine contenders or convincing pretenders.

The best place to start might be out of the limelight and away from the punishment beatings. The foundation for any revival will be confidence and fitness and a few happy afternoons.

We seem, tsk tsk, to have forgotten already the lesson of Kevin Heffernan and the old footballing Dubs. Heffernan took the straggling team in late 1973 when it was at its lowest point. He used a season in the wilderness to build fitness and develop a habit of winning games. By September 1974 they'd gone from stragglers to swaggerers.

Nobody is saying Dublin or Antrim are going to win a McCarthy Cup in the next year or so, but what is perceived as rock bottom may well transpire to be a springboard. We watched both sides in Casement Park a while ago as they duked it out at the desperate tail-end of the league.

The team which made the early breakthrough in that game (Antrim) mopped up all the confidence in the place like a gambler sweeping up chips. Both teams looked as if they could do with a year's worth of games where they built self-belief and went away and worked on things without their labours being punctuated by afternoons of humiliation and despair.

At the other, more evolved, end of the qualifier food chain, the outcome of the current experiment will be studied with keener interest.

Waterford looked sharp on Saturday night and if a 23-point win at home in Walsh Park won't have taught them much about themselves it will have provided as much benefit as a fortnight's training.

They will be mindful of course of last summer, when as Munster champions they spent six weeks twiddling their thumbs as Cork meandered off into a more straightforward qualifier system but enjoyed the benefit of games with which to tweak and modify their side.

Cork have a shorter wait this summer than Waterford did last summer, but after the second half of the Munster final they have more worries. Kilkenny, the new Leinster champions, have an even shorter wait.

Perhaps the balance is right at last. We miss the winner-takes-all nature of early summer hurling but concede it was cruel and unusual punishment for players.

Hopefully, half a decade down the line from the onset of the current experiment we will be looking at some novel quarter-finals and perhaps even wondering how one of the blue-blood counties is going to fare in the Christy Ring Cup.