The commencement of the Church & General National Hurling League this weekend takes place in the long shadow cast by last season, the first in a two-year experiment with the calendar year. The regulation matches 12 months ago outstripped the wildest ambitions of the Hurling Development Committee.

Good weather and big crowds resulted in a huge rise in attendances and a welter of public enthusiasm after the first real close-season enjoyed by inter-county hurling. Unfortunately by the end of the summer, the picture wasn't as glorious. The crux of the experiment was the simultaneous playing of league and championship matches, particularly the knockout stages of the NHL which were staged in July and August to general indifference.

The sides still involved in the championship were soley concerned with that whereas those who had been eliminated had no great enthusiasm with the exception of Limerick whose final victory in October was greeted with muted celebrations and the immediate removal of manager Tom Ryan.

This time around, the most obvious flaws have been remedied and the competition will be completed by the time the championship starts. It is a moot point whether this will be enough to save the league in the short-term.

Last year, it became clearer than ever before that the competition was a secondary concern. Not alone did the behaviour of teams juggling with fixtures in July and August testify to this but the behaviour of counties during the regulation programme also hinted as much.

Clare and Wexford between them won the Munster and Leinster titles and of course the AllIreland but both were due to be relegated until the league was restructured and preserved their Division One status.

Wexford had the excuse of having won the previous All-Ireland but unlike their predecessors had enjoyed a pre-Christmas break. It still took them too long to establish momentum for the championship and the casualty of this was their league form.

Clare started well but more or less applied the brakes at the midway stage, fearing that they were going to peak too soon. They were one of the counties whose first championship match preceded the end of their NHL campaign. Accordingly, under-strength teams were fielded.

Already this year, managers are detailing their priorities as the breaking in of new players and the identification of a best 15 for when the summer starts.

This is nothing new in essence but its timing has changed and precedent has been set. It was always going to be a problem for the new format should the relegated (or bottom) teams the first year do well in the championship.

Preferably the league winners would have had good championships pour encourager les autres. Instead the league was taken by a county which had produced a notably flat championship performance - quite at odds with Limerick's early league form.

Now that this has happened - and the effect is amplified by the comparative difficulty in getting relegated from Division One (one team from 12 rather than three from eight - other counties are bound to be more ambivalent about the competition. This is not necessarily a good thing for hurling but as long as the stakes remain so high in the championship, the concept of having only so many good performances in a team gains credence.

Ideally for the sake of all counties, there should be simultaneous league and championship matches during the best conditions of the year but obviously the counties aren't yet buying this ideal.

The question now is whether with the novelty element gone, the public will turn up in quite the same numbers to see what is for many teams a series of trials.