LIKE Cork last year, Kilkenny were able to complement their Guinness All-Ireland title with the rosy glow of an apparently assured future. The team featured a number of young players and, of the rest, only Willie O'Connor and John Power are over 30.

Even allowing for the less-than-productive yield from under-age success in the last decade, the county looks to have enough on hand to be contenders for the foreseeable future.

Offaly's future is more worrying. Although there was some thumbing of the county's nose at pessimists after the defeat of Cork, the fact remains that the team is ageing collectively, with the younger players struggling last week and the provincial successes at minor and under-21 a long way off providing the sort of renewal required.

Next season may not suit Offaly as well as the last three have. Proposals to scrap the current system - in the vernacular "the back door" - are to go before congress next spring and, if approved, would apply to the 2001 championship. Far from rewarding provincial finalists, the new plan would disadvantage them.

All teams who fail to reach the provincial finals in Munster and Leinster will enter a parallel, open-draw competition - similar to that formulated for the football championship - along with Galway and the Ulster champions.

The only teams excluded from this will be the beaten provincial finalists which means that the Munster and Leinster finals will go from being the only matches teams could lose to the one provincial fixture teams can't lose.

The room for calculation is also limited. Taking this year's draw, would it be more appealing to Offaly to beat Wexford in order to face Kilkenny in a do-or-die Leinster final or lose and take their chances in the open draw along with Galway and Clare?

Whatever about the impact of the putative new system on Offaly - and in fairness to Wexford, Kilkenny and all the Munster counties, they didn't lose their appetite for provincial finals - it will shake up the championship in one very positive way.

After years of stagnant, repetitious fixtures, it will provide for novel pairings and more interesting, nationwide matches. There will, in a sense, be fewer places to hide.

To be fair, they weren't hiding last week. Offaly's demeanour in the aftermath suggested that, rather than being stunned or shell-shocked, they had simply had their worst fears confirmed.

One player said that there was no sense of achievement in reaching an All-Ireland only to lose it, but that it was better to be beaten heavily than to lose narrowly and spend the next year agonising over all the things which could have made a difference.

In a way, the team over-achieved by defeating Cork and, in the midst of all the speculation about Kilkenny losing three finals, it was forgotten that Offaly too were under pressure - pressure to be Offaly, to defy all the pundits and pull another epic success out of the hat.

At Offaly's farcical media night there was a downbeat atmosphere - far more reminiscent of preparations for the 1995 final than of the more relaxed air two years ago. And there were similarities between 1995's final and last Sunday's.

Five years ago, they were expected to beat Clare and didn't cope well with the pressure to win an All-Ireland. Last week the expectation was that they would be competitive. The pressure was to survive. Again it was too much.

The match was decided by goals, specifically the first. The sight of Carey getting a goal and burying so early the speculation about his indifferent All-Ireland final performances indicated the worst from an Offaly perspective.

Some observers in Kilkenny believe that Carey was strongly motivated by his omission from the Millennium team announced during the summer.

Additional motivation was provided by the focus on his three most recent All-Ireland displays and their cumulative yield of one point from play.

Generally a modest enough individual, Carey has been bristling a bit over the - inaccurate - shorthand view that he's never had a good All-Ireland. Even on Monday he was at pains to point out that, whereas his clubmate Pat O'Neill had won the man of the match award in 1992, he wouldn't have been far off the pace that day himself.

Overall the win was a triumph for Kilkenny manager Brian Cody. His serene command had restored equilibrium to the camp in 1999 after a turbulent couple of years.

For all the failings of the opposition, it was an emphatic display by Kilkenny.