AMONG the teams lining up for that curious mix of anticipation and dread that characterises the National League play offs are last year's All Ireland finalists, Meath and Mayo, whose failure to win matches at the weekend has cost them the comfort of staying put in Divisions One and Two respectively.

Whereas the recent trend of league winning teams falling flat during the summer has been remarked on, the reverse process has become apparent in the last couple of years.

Neither Dublin nor Tyrone qualified for last season's play offs after contesting the previous All Ireland final, whereas Down and Dublin were both relegated from Division One months after they had contested the 1994 final.

Meath and Mayo can point this year to a number of unfortunate aggravations that contributed to uninspired league campaigns, but is there anything more to this sequence than coincidence? Peter McGrath, manager of Down, believes there is.

He comes from a background that leaves him well qualified to make the connections. His All Ireland successes, in 1991 and 1994, were followed by dismal league campaigns. This season, he was forced to march his team out of the shabby confines of Division Three, where their post 1994 decline had left them 12 months ago.

"It's not co-incidental," he says. "In my experience a number of factors come into play. First there is fatigue. Reaching All-Ireland finals requires an enormous amount of training sustained throughout a long summer and involvement in high pressure matches.

"We never lost a final, but, even as winners, the sense of achievement and the high that comes with it rapidly gives way to a great sense of anti climax before the league begins. There's no time for emotional rest.

"The teams you're playing are trying to be at the All Ireland champions. They're hungry, fresh and enthusiastic, and it's hard for you to find that dimension. It's a fairly logical rationale to explain.

"People also carry injuries through the summer, and, when the championship's over, they are told to take a break. Our experience both years was that we played most of our matches with weakened teams.

"There's not a lot you can do. In `94, the players were determined that what happened in `91 wouldn't occur again. But our second match was away to Laois land by halftime they were leading by 13 points. We just had no answers.

It can be argued that because the divisions are so tight, with only eight teams, there has to be a certain amount of caprice in all of this. Had Mayo not conceded a late point, they would have been safe. Maybe but the pressures on a team involved in an All Ireland create stresses that only take a toll when the hype is over.

Mayo and Meath can also argue that the suspensions handed down by the Games Administration Committee weakened them considerably in the vital pre-Christmas matches, but the texture of the results was similar on either side of the new year inconsistent and prone to flatness.

In the week when the National Hurling League has its first full Sunday of the new calendar year season, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that football's meandering, arrangement of fixtures, which is contributing to the penalising of successful teams, now needs urgent attention.