THE HURLING year took off at the weekend with an excellent afternoon's hurling in Limerick. Cork and Clare provided the first fully televised match of the championship which should have left the attendance of around 20,000 and the broadcast audience well satisfied.

The match showed that there is work to be done in Gaelic games and plenty of it. The burden of that work will not fall on Clare's management, who have begun smoothly the business of providing what looks like another formidable summer challenge. Nor will it fall on Jimmy Barry Murphy, who now tries to overcome the disappointment of his young side's narrow defeat by focusing on next month's League quarter-final

No. Last weekend indicated that the most substantial workload in current Gaelic games - and certainly during the presidency of Joe McDonagh - is the responsibility of the Football Development Committee.

After the false promise of last month's fine Connacht championship clash between Galway and Mayo in Tuam, football has regressed once again into the deeply flawed product that has failed so dismally to provide a decent number of matches combining skills, excitement and discipline.

It's extremely difficult to conceive of a football match that could provide a spectacle such as Sunday's in the Gaelic Grounds where Clare combined technique and physique to out-play a smaller, skillful team like Cork without the contest degenerating into a gruesome spectacle.

For a start, ambitious football teams rarely risk physical disadvantage. You can't argue with the proposition that "a good big 'un is better than a good little 'un," but frequently football subscribes to the view that a limited big 'un is better than a good little 'un.

Football remains overwhelmingly the more popular of the games. It is more democratic, less hung up by tradition than hurling which tolerates areas of deprivation scarcely known in football. It is competitive and very few teams harbour zero hopes of winning at least one championship outing.

These positive elements are helped along by the game being more easily mastered than hurling. Widespread participation helps create that competitiveness which in turn feeds public interest. The problem with this demographic fact is that it gets used as an argument for leaving football alone.

Two years ago, live broadcast of matches was initiated and one of the principal motivations was the enhanced marketing of hurling. This has turned out to be well founded. Both championships have been classics with popular winners. Their huge popularity has been greatly amplified by television.

Football, however, is suffering because the product hasn't been marketable. The number of good matches in recent years has been very low and too often the broadcast audience has been exposed to the worst traits of football.

Next weekend, All-Ireland champions Meath take on old rivals Dublin in a Leinster first round, but many Gaelic games supporters will tell you that they would far prefer to travel to Thurles for the Tipperary-Limerick Munster hurling semi-final. It's hard to imagine the views of the television audience would be much different.

This summer's 18 football matches have been notable for two reasons: the number of players sent off (11) and the number of draws (six which should be seven as Leitrim were level with London at the end of 70 minutes but by special provision, extra-time was played). More than half of the dismissed players walked in drawn matches.

There may be a link in that tight matches are inevitably more tense and liable to rancour, but a further connection can also be made. Those cosmopolitan enough to risk exposure to an alien code will have noticed in soccer's more recent World Cup tournaments that fewer and fewer countries are getting beaten out the gate.

High levels of fitness and a tactical negativity have been proved effective in avoiding heavy defeats or any sort of defeat. Football is beginning to move in this direction. It's obviously a lot harder in a game with so many scoring opportunities for a better team to be frustrated over 70 minutes, but many coaches feel it's worth a go.

Accomplishing such grim tasks may be satisfying for the relevant participants, but physical emphasis and spoiling tactics are killing the game as a spectacle. Some matches avoid this dismal stereotype, but the blight is systemic. The anomalies in the game are being exploited and officialdom appears powerless.

Referees are frequently abused in the aftermath of big matches. Why? Can it be argued that Gaelic games attract particularly low-quality officials. Does a similar handicap apply to any other area of GAA activity? If not, why is it logical that referees rather than the arcane rules they apply should be primarily culpable?

Most debate about the rules, starts with the tackle. Its advocates defend it as a reasonable provision for either shoulder-to-shoulder contact or else tackling the ball. The problem here is that so few players can execute the tackle on the ball. It can't be purely because of bad coaching why should one particular skill be so difficult to acquire when other skills are fairly widely practised?

A tackle that requires a defender to be a contortionist is plainly not reasonable.

One senior inter-county referee has privately described football as "unrefereeable". This frustration with a game that is played at high-speed and in which accidental physical contact is a regular occurrence is understandable.

The Football Development Committee has so far met just once. It must first of all synthesise a common view of what needs to be done with the game and then act. You don't have to be a traditional "catch-and-kick" zealot to favour change. Football can still be a short passing game, but the question of possession must be addressed.

Hurling benefits from limiting the number of times a player can take the ball to hand before playing it. An academic study currently being digested in Croke Park traces the majority of fouls in football to the root cause of prolonged possession in a game with no sustainable rules on dispossession.

Coming to grips with this unavoidable reality should be an urgent item on the Committee's agenda.