A FEW thoughts from Croke Park, home of country and western music. The public address announcer's pleas to followers of Dublin and Meath to stay off the pitch - unless presumably they were wearing cowboy hats and carrying guitars - sounded comically hollow to those who had spent even a little of the previous couple of hours aghast at the state of the playing surface at headquarters.

The two football matches didn't suffer too badly, but for those of us who had missed the previous week's hurling match between Laois and Offaly, the sight of the scarred and uneven ground came as quite a jolt, particularly with the Leinster hurling semi-finals coming up next Sunday.

There's not a lot more to be said on the subject that won't have already occurred to the powers that be, but the commercial good of any organisation is scarcely served by subverting the core business in favour of fringe dealings, no matter how lucrative they may occasionally be.

In the 11 years since the emblematically-named Simple Minds destroyed the Leinster hurling final, it had been imagined that measures had been developed to prevent this sort of disaster. Either the technology exists to protect the pitch adequately from the staging of concerts or it doesn't. If not, they shouldn't take place at times of the year when championship hurling will be affected.

The Leinster Council, who are again the hapless tenants affected by all of this, would be well within their rights to cancel their arrangement and ring up Semple Stadium with a view to securing a playing surface worthy of their championship.

Seamlessly moving from scarred turf to scarred psyches, there was a glum symmetry to yesterday's results from Munster and Leinster. Limerick's hurlers had been encouragingly compared to Dublin's footballers as an incentive to keep going.

This comparison apparently irritated Limerick's manager Tom Ryan - not because he quailed at having to lose another 97 big matches before eventually winning an All-Ireland, but because he felt that the glib yoking of the two teams presumed an inevitability of success for Limerick and took no account of the differing circumstances of the teams.

On Sunday he was proved right. The basis of the comparison was that any county which has a firm grip on its province can plausibly await the bounce of the ball in the All-Ireland series. The unfortunate evidence of the weekend is that Limerick's hold on Munster is fading.

It took Dublin four years of unbeaten football in Leinster before they added an All-Ireland. Limerick concluded four years of contending on Sunday by shipping a 10-point defeat, to go with the nine-point defeat inflicted on them by Clare in the Munster final of two years ago.

That loss might possibly have been filed under aberration were it not for last weekend's setback. In retrospect, Limerick's four-year cycle looks more like a biennial drive for the All-Ireland interleaved with biennial burn-out.

The irony of the defeat was that the lack of forward power - long seen as Limerick's Achilles heel - was hardly mentioned in the run-up to the match, largely because the team's attack had invariably done enough to confound the criticism.

Not, however, on Sunday, when the squandering by Limerick's forwards of first-half possession was at the heart of Tipperary's emphatic victory.

It is likely that Ryan has now achieved everything he can with the team and that a change of management is on the cards. Ryan has shown an iron fortitude over his term of office. The most successful hurling manager the county has had in nearly 20 years, he has invariably been under fire, from county officials and players alike. He deserved more recognition than he received, but now he deserves a bit of peace and quiet.

Which brings us to Dublin. Their defeat by Meath wasn't as epochal as Limerick's fall in Thurles, because the rot set in during last year's Leinster final. It is, however, a critical juncture.

Some startling revisionism has tried to depict Sunday's match as a triumph in adversity and a case for the current management to be given another go and that they be allowed reconsider their collective decision to step down if defeated by Meath.

It's hard to see the benefits in such a course of action for anyone. Mickey Whelan and his selectors have had two years to state a case and it hasn't been convincing.

Having tried to dismantle the team he inherited and rebuild it by bringing back players whose replacement had been deemed by the previous management team as integral to ultimate success, Whelan performed a volte-face this year and last Sunday put out 75 per cent of the All-Ireland winning side. There was no improvement in the result.

Whelan did his best and recriminations about whether he should have been appointed in the first place are pointless at this stage. As someone with a genuine passion for the game and the county, and an engaging openness about discussing his views on football, he was subjected to unjust abuse at various stages.

That injustice shouldn't, however, blind the Dublin authorities to the need for change. Two years isn't long enough to develop a winning team, but given the starting point of an All-Ireland-winning panel, it's long enough to expect some sort of progress.

Each of his three predecessors won the League in the first year of their tenures. The most successful, Pat O'Neill, won three Leinsters, one NFL and an All-Ireland in three years. Paddy Cullen managed an NFL and a Leinster in two years, and Gerry McCaul - in the most trying circumstances with Meath at their peak - won an NFL and a Leinster in four years.

Whelan shouldn't be criticised purely for failing to win the League. The competition frequently doesn't fit into a manager's championship plans; but it is a useful barometer of progress, and in its absence other evidence has to be adduced.

Over two years, Dublin have made no impact in the League and, more relevantly, have in each succeeding championship thrown away matches against a young and insecure Meath team. Such a characterisation of the All-Ireland champions last Sunday may appear exaggerated, but Meath's confidence had disintegrated by the time Dublin cut the margin to a point going into the final quarter.

With Dublin's failure to equalise over the next 10 minutes, it dawned on the champions that they weren't the only ones cracking. Significantly, thereafter Meath had the players to pick off the crucial scores whereas Dublin, with all the chances including a penalty, didn't.

Mickey Whelan and his selectors still have a year left to serve, as their appointment was for three years. But they should think twice about taking advantage of any bureaucratic inertia in Dublin and hanging around for another year.

Instead, they should reflect on Paddy Cullen's good grace in circumstances where he knew it was time to go. With style and good humour, he bit the bullet in the wake of the All-Ireland defeat of 1992, rather than hang around and create waves.

A number of players are now expected to retire and the task of rebuilding will be arduous. It is in Dublin's best interests that the process begin with a quick resolution of the management position.