The county take on Kildare tomorrow knowing there has been a slip in their standards since they were challenging for honours, writes SEÁN MORAN

THE SUPPORTERS following Offaly’s footballers to Portlaoise tomorrow will be particularly fervent in their desire for success. A championship opener against a well-regarded Kildare team isn’t necessarily the basis for rampant optimism but the county knows that if precedent means anything failure is likely to mean the end of the summer.

For a county with a reasonably modern pedigree – having won a first provincial title in 1960, Offaly run a clear third to Dublin and Meath in the intervening years – the current decade and the age of the qualifiers has been a disappointment, especially considering the most recent championship 12 years ago and the dash and brio with which it was won. And despite the introduction of the qualifier system eight years ago, Offaly have been conspicuous in their lack of engagement with the second-chance format.

The county contested only seven of the qualifier competitions, having been in Division Four in 2007, and in five of those years, failed to win a single match on the outside track, getting eliminated in their first fixture and reaching the nadir last year when Down rifled 5-19 past them. Of the three wins during those seven years, two were against London and Clare even if more encouragingly ahead of tomorrow, one was at Kildare’s expense.

“If the qualifiers were done away with in the morning,” says Kevin Kilmurray of the great back-to-back All-Ireland winners of 1971-’72 and more recently county manager, “Offaly would do better in the Leinster championship.

“Offaly players find it hard to face defeat in the Leinster championship. I’m not saying the qualifiers are second-class because look at the teams that have won All-Irelands coming through that way but the psyche is different in the county and Offaly players just haven’t accepted the back door.”

It’s not as if the county’s fortunes in the traditional championship have been sun-kissed. Apart from defeat by Dublin in the 2006 Leinster final the high points of the narrative since the 1997 success have been mostly in the conditional tense.

“We slipped,” says county chair Pat Teehan, “but when Pádraig Nolan was there we were a bit unlucky, once against Kildare in Nowlan Park which went to replay and we should have won both matches and then against Westmeath with the point that wasn’t and I suppose we did get to the Leinster final in 2006.”

The past 12 years have seen squabbling over managers, most recently with the demoralising saga of Richie Connor, the county’s last All-Ireland winning captain, who walked away just weeks into his appointment because of player dissatisfaction. It is accepted that Tom Cribbin, who took over, has done a good job of settling the situation and what looked like a death battle against relegation back to the basement turned into a third-place finish in Division Three.

Kilmurray remains worried that Offaly is running to stand still in relation to its competitors.

“The inputs into a successful modern team in terms of time and finance are enormous. Look at the successful counties and look at their development of facilities and expenditure and you can see where that success starts. I’m not saying that you can buy success but it costs money to get to the starting line.

“There has to be a development system. That’s under way at the moment and Offaly knows how to be successful because there is a wonderful tradition, certainly of Leinster titles. But we’re still lagging behind and slipping back and it’s very hard to recover lost ground.”

For tomorrow Cribbin has named a new-look team featuring five newcomers and relegating the hitherto nearly ever-present Ciarán McManus to the bench. It’s a sign of improved underage structures, which have produced three minor finalists in Leinster during the past four years.

“We would be happy with the development aspect,” says Teehan, “and proof of that is in how the minors have been doing in recent years. There are plenty of young players coming through and I’d be a lot happier now than I was four or five years ago.”

If short-term confidence is in scarce supply there are, Teehan believes, grounds for longer-term optimism. “I hope that we won’t be in the qualifiers on Sunday but I think the approach will change if we are. We’re going out with a new team and it’s a lot easier to get young players motivated for the qualifiers than it is an older team. Irrespective of what happens this weekend, that team has a future going forward if we give Tom Cribbin a chance.”