All-Ireland SHC/Clare v Kilkenny: Do Clare have a shout? That is the question on everybody's lips as we await the next chapter in Kilkenny's tumultuous quest for immortality. For very different reasons, there is an impenetrable silence around both counties as they prepare for a quarter-final that is, rightly or wrongly, being painted as a clash between two uncompromising hurling cultures.

By whatever considerations, it has been quite a week in the life of Brian Cody. As a schoolteacher of decades' standing, he knows just how a choice rap on the knuckles can smart and he received just that from the GAC during the week. On top of that, he has had to deal with countless depictions of his behaviour on the sideline against Galway in Thurles as being akin to Heathcliff gnashing out on the wily, windy moors.

Because his most colourful gesticulations were not captured on television, the rights and wrongs of the behaviour of the normally sanguine and composed Kilkenny manager will remain a matter of interpretation. However, he will have noted that many commentators went to town on him.

Yet, someone who notably sprung to his defence when the focus shifted from the hour of Kilkenny's deathly splendour to the mechanism that provoked it (namely Cody) was former Clare selector Tony Considine. In his weekly column for the Irish Examiner, he argued that the Kilkenny manager had merely done his job. Shades, some would contend, of Jack Nicholson ordering a "Code Red" in A Few Good Men. But this week, Considine was adamant in his belief that to punish Cody would have been wrong.

"One of the reasons I supported him was that I could empathise with his position. I know what it is like to stand on the line," he wrote. "Now, I don't know Brian Cody at all, have never spoken to the man, but I thought he managed brilliantly that evening. I felt the vilification of him was unfair.

"They said he went out to bully. How do they know? I mean, he went and spoke to the referee, but only Brian Cody and Anthony Kirwan know what was said. And he was not cited for abuse."

Considine is happy to declare he was no stranger to official censure and was dispatched three times from the Clare sideline to watch from the stands over remonstrations that were deemed overenthusiastic. He claims today he did nothing wrong then and was delighted to see what he feels is good sense prevailing in the storm surrounding Cody.

The ethics of that evening have been debated long enough now, but if it is to be accepted that Cody acted in a manner that represented a new departure from his trademark sideline demeanour - flushed, sometimes vexed, but generally unobtrusive to the public eye - the question remains as to why.

On the eve of the 2002 final against Clare, Cody - contemplating the previous year's All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Galway - told a gathering at Langton's: "No matter what happens, my responsibility is for the fire and spirit of the team on any given day. How the team plays is governed by the spirit that is bursting out of them on the day and that was not strong enough in that semi-final match."

It is accepted theory that Cody squirrelled away the pain and annoyance and the inescapable moral of that Galway loss for appropriate use, occasionally using the mere mention of it as a stick to beat his players (or at least those who survived from that afternoon) with when it suited.

Given DJ Carey's post-match comments a fortnight ago, one can assume the 2001 loss was revisited in excruciating detail so that it became a live and troublesome poltergeist once more. But does that fully account for the half-starved manner in which his team ate alive that evening's hurling?

Cody, as manager, was man enough to take the 2001 defeat personally and dwelt upon it as such. Players, by nature, must move on from the wasteland of major disappointments and those Kilkenny lads had been garlanded with two years of All-Ireland medals, All-Star awards and the attendant fluttering eyelashes that such trophies provoke.

Could they really have had it in for poor Galway to that degree? It is more likely that the riveting and, for neutral onlookers, frightening nature of their performance was a response not directly to the loss against Wexford but to its broader consequences.

As Cyril Farrell puts it, "Kilkenny people reacted to that beating by Wexford as if it were some kind of national tragedy".

Which in a way, it was. One of the most popular GAA cyberspace strongholds is kilkennycats.com, all the more so because of its column The Stubborn Nore, authored by "Arrigal", whose contributions to several such websites have come to carry serious weight. After the stunning, summer-flipping upset against Wexford, Arrigal had this to say: "The searing disappointment felt afterwards by Kilkenny followers had one main focus. No real complaints were heard about the denouement itself: like death and taxes, defeat is always out there, awaiting its drear moment.

"No, it is the particular year that is in it. The chance of achieving three senior titles in a row does not lightly present itself. It may never again present itself in Arrigal's lifetime. More care should have been taken. Pretty much by definition losing an eminently winnable contest to a last-second score is always going to be a right scald. To lose the chance of winning - in frontal fashion - a three in a row felt like an awful amputation."

The prestige of reaching the second Sunday in September undefeated still holds a lot of emotional weight in Kilkenny. You have to wonder whether that factor will, at some level, weigh on the players' minds. In the light of their murderous disposal of the maroon challenge, we can assume that weigh it did, and unforgettably.

Brian Cody is a perfectionist and the annoyance - the irrevocable irritation - of letting slip the chance of a perfect third consecutive McCarthy Cup summer - is something that will probably gnaw at him regardless of how this season pans out. It would be wrong to suggest that a "back-door" championship would in any way diminish an historic three-in-a-row feat by this Kilkenny team.

But maybe there is a sense of a diamond merchant cutting the most precious stone in the world yet knowing that under the microscope it is marked with a tiny graze. He will have felt the sense of disappointment around his home place and if he was agitated and wound-up against Galway, it may have been partly an act of self-flagellation. And it is true to say that the persuasive combination of iron and passion and pure hurling that his team responded with against Galway will have done much to warm any lukewarm home fans about the rest of this championship.

So next up is Clare. The fact and lessons of Cody's sideline show will not have been lost on Anthony Daly, one of the brightest and most demonstrative men in hurling. The Clarecastle man probably felt he made a rookie mistake before the hiding against Waterford in that he presided over a very open camp.

It was only a mistake because Clare were at the wrong end of a Waterford cascade from which there could be no shelter. The quiet, methodical way Clare have gone about the business of healing since then has been understandable although it would be a shame were the pressures of the game to make a hermit out of one so loquacious as Daly.

The night after the Kilkenny-Galway game, Cyril Farrell predicted Clare would advance to meet Kilkenny and give every last of ounce their considerable of physical and hurling worth.

"Clare being Clare, you would always have to give them a chance," he said this week. "They will definitely physically contest against Kilkenny - they are a fairly big team - and they have been tipping away and getting themselves right in the qualifiers."

But he does not necessarily foresee the fire-and-brimstone confrontation that has been predicted.

"I suppose the spotlight will be on Brian Cody the next day, although Ihave to say that I had no problem with the way he was down in Thurles. Anyway, I think that Kilkenny will approach this game in a different way, in a cuter way. Their style against Galway served its purpose but they won't be going out trying to repeat that every time.

"What you have now is a very balanced Kilkenny side again. In Thurles, they won the battle of wills. This is a new and different challenge now and I expect we will see Kilkenny responding to it as such."

There is said to be a school of thought in Kilkenny that it might have been beneficial had Cody been slapped with a one-match ban purely to provide some new motivational weaponry, another identifiable cause to stir the troops again. For also preying on Kilkenny minds is how extremely difficult it must be for Cody to engage 30 young athletes on the same mental wavelength as compels him.

Arrigal again: "A group that has as much hurling and training done as this Kilkenny one is, sooner or later, going to run down its batteries to the point where sides they would previously have beaten edge up to their shoulder and then hurtle beyond them. All you can do, as a manager, is to slow the rate of that decline with more varied training. We die of life, as they say."

"They", presumably, were not the O'Connor brothers or any of the Glenmore crowd.

But the worry is there, the natural human instinct to fret and mother a bunch of athletes still valiantly attempting to go where no Kilkenny team - nor any of hurling's anointed trinity - has gone before. As they close in on September, all hills will begin to look steep and treacherous.

It is funny that a team that toured the dancehalls with the passion and abandon of the Clare team of the 1990s never really established any great rapport or body heat with the Kilkenny representatives of that period.

They contested games but in a curiously bloodless and civilised way. Tomorrow, the vestiges of a great Clare team are certain to rage against the dying of the light. Kilkenny, too, will battle against the extinguishing of a flame that is altogether more celestial and historic.

"You would have to be looking at Kilkenny to come through," reckons Farrell, "but there are great Clare lads there who live for games like this and it is going to be interesting anyhow."

During the forecasts for the season, it was blithely assumed that Kilkenny's dominance would make for a bland season. Cody argued against such presumptions but we just smiled. And now, for reasons that no-one could have predicted, Kilkenny have again become the fascination of the day.

Beaten, rattled, censured, hauled over the coals, they responded in a scarifying fashion and are playing for their lives.