You can surely plan the future by the past

PM O'Sullivan/The Ciotóg Side: You'd think one column would cover it. Not at all. You'd feel a week would finish most topics. Not a bit of it.

Boyle: I'm telling you Joxer th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis!

- Seán O'Casey, Juno and The Paycock (1924).

That famous exclamation in O'Casey's work, appalled and half-delighted in equal measure, remains apt. Hurling is still lodged in markedly introspective mood. So we hear, thrown off on opinion's sofa like Capt Boyle and Joxer Daly, affirming and skiving a set of duties in the one and same over-affable breath.

Hurling. Hurling. Hurling, by god. Scratch, rub, pick. Lint, fluff, wax. Detritus from all parts of the code's contours. And still no consistent diagnosis, let alone a cure. Be grateful for small lurgies. Comment in some quarters all but drapes a shroud on future competitiveness.

Conor Hayes has been blunt about more than throw-in times: "I said sarcastically some time ago that the way the hurling championship is going it will begin and end with four teams in August. The rest of the programme will be incidental. And maybe that's what's transpiring now."

There is no doubt that current structures are incoherent. Correctly or incorrectly, Wexford are widely perceived as the weakest outfit in the final eight. Yet Clare, without even making a Munster final, have drawn the Slaneysiders two seasons in a row.

The reality of such happenstance makes a mockery of the wall-eyed few who claim the quarter-finals involve an 'easier' draw for provincial champions. The underlying rationale would emerge if such figures were apprised of imminent nuclear apocalypse: 'Ah well. Sure at least X will never win another All-Ireland title.'

Anyway, was the scéal ever so different? This season's headliner is Cork's attempt at a third title on the trot. An obvious co-ordinate, so, when parsing present decline and past splendour, is the manner in which the Rebels' previous three-in-a-rows were won.

There have been four such feats. With each contest's winning margin bracketed, the rosters involved make for interesting reading.

1894: Limerick (19); Tipperary (8); Dublin (29).

1943: Kerry (14); Waterford (5); Antrim (27).

1954: Waterford (12); Tipperary (3); Galway (18); Wexford (3).

1978: Waterford (12); Clare (2); Kilkenny (4).

There you have it. Even a minimalist narrative is clear: the past is no different a country where competitiveness is concerned. Could it be credibly argued that a Cork three-in-a-row in 2006 would not surpass in all terms those forged in earlier years?

At least the current mood has an intriguing aspect. For once, the association's past is worthy of veneration. There was a rather different tone last Wednesday night on Park Live, the RTÉ show, which featured a sketch entitled The Fitzgibbon Report.

Nature of sketch: excruciatingly inept, teeth-looseningly tedious, skirting uneasily with the theme of clerical abuse. A GAA apparatchik, who we just know had halitosis, was quizzing a black fella about his hurling skills with barely disguised racism. Mind you, this carry-on was of a piece with recent sketches on Après Match. That moustached cute hoor of a past, don't you just love it?

Hurling, hurling. Not just a darlin' game but the most beautiful game. Who would demur, except skiers on cultural self-hatred's piste? The irrelevant, such as Declan Lynch in the Sunday Independent, and the relevant, such as Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Independent. They are not few, in the media, and sometimes they write sketches.

You really could not make it up. Even Park Live, as a title, seeks to make the association more snazzy by alluding to Park Life (1994), Blur's epochal LP. Actually, this record is one in a grand pop tradition that celebrates Englishness, music that stretches from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968) to Pete Doherty and The Libertines' vision of 'Albion'.

The championship concluded, this space will have to make a start on documenting cultural self-hatred in the GAA realm.

Hurling, hurling. Simultaneous boredom and surprise is well and good when you are Glenda Gilson's eyebrows. They are well remunerated. Other ways, it would be nice to have emotions held by a coherent framework. We shall see what the HDC say.

For the moment, lie back on that horsehair sofa and think of Ireland. Last week's column had occasion to mention a certain 'whiggish' tendency in Denis Walsh's Hurling: The Revolution Years (2005), whereby human agency was mysteriously deleted from the march of events. As if responding, Walsh's latest column in the Sunday Times wisely remarked: "To revive the championship we need a couple of messianic figures - from somewhere.

"Wexford and Limerick - to list two obvious examples - both need somebody who can drive, unite, convince, embolden and elevate county panels that are scandalously underachieving . . . Finding the best system is naturally important but in fairness to Croke Park there's nothing they can do to make players burst themselves in pursuit of a dream if the desire and the dream isn't in them already."

Too true. As it was and ever shall be, sham. Only the present can make the past history.

PM O'Sullivan is an academic and a hurling writer, whose column The Stubborn Nore appears on www.kilkennycats.com