Seán Moran believes the long-term effectiveness of the qualifier series may hinge on last year's success stories maintaining their progress.

What happens next? After last year's inaugural qualifier series, can the football season repeat that roaring success? In other words to what extent is the GAA guaranteed that the new format will deliver greater excitement, surprises and enhanced revenue?

The most obvious feature of last year was the appetite of the public for more matches. Saturday evenings were a particular success with crowds turning out in big numbers for some of the most memorable fixtures of the summer such as Kildare-Donegal and Mayo-Westmeath. That interest will still be there, but mention of Westmeath raises a couple of points.

Like Sligo, Westmeath symbolised one aspect of the success of the qualifiers - hitherto marginalised counties who took big scalps.

This was obviously important for the counties concerned but it also established a linkage between the top and bottom counties that did wonders for football's morale.

Wexford nearly beat Westmeath and only lost in a replay. That meant Wexford had drawn with a team that drew with a team that beat the All-Ireland champions by 15 points. That may be tenuous consolation for Wexford, but it gave a satisfyingly democratic dimension to championships previously run along lines of rigid caste and pointed up hurling's regional confinement.

Fingers will be crossed that such counties can maintain their progress because failure to do so will knock back morale and place last year's achievements in a less flattering context.

It would also question the long-term effectiveness of the system in bringing on counties.

Not that anyone need expect the Bastille to be stormed in the near future. Top-class sport is ultimately about elites and there is an elite in football. Everyone's now familiar with the three-year loop that's due for renewal after the last six All-Irelands have gone to Meath, Kerry, Galway and Meath, Kerry, Galway.

There is good reason for this. Possession of All-Ireland medals gives a team an advantage in certain tight situations, an edge in self-confidence on the biggest occasions. It is significant that of the teams that won All-Irelands in the five years before the current cartel swung into action, only Derry have made it back to the All-Ireland semi-finals and then with only half the team that had won the championship five years previously.

Consequently the new order had their path smoothed a little by the absence of ranked contenders and the emergence of counties after long absence from the top table.

Mayo, Kildare and Cork hadn't an All-Ireland medal between them when reaching four of the past six finals. It's only in the past two seasons that Galway, Kerry and Meath have had to face each other in finals.

Even this year most observers are going with further success for the cartel - even if few fancy Meath to maintain the sequence - with only Tyrone being tipped from the outside.

Nonetheless the point has to be made year after year that championships are organic. They change and develop over the four and a half months. Were the All-Ireland being run on a strict league basis, there would be some justification in picking the best teams on paper and predicting success for them but the element of knockout remains an important variable.

Granted a team can't be dismissed on the basis of one poor performance but so much still depends on the draw.

There are interesting case studies from last year. Galway's is the most important. It wasn't that Roscommon caught them momentarily off guard in the Connacht semi-final. Galway were not in good shape. There had been a row in the camp featuring the Donnellans, the team performed poorly and substantial changes had to be made.

It's easy to look back and say that John O'Mahony learned so much from what went wrong that he had some sort of diagnostic checklist for straightforward implementation. Losing to Roscommon was a crisis that many felt Galway mightn't survive. O'Mahony himself accepts that it was the biggest challenge of his managerial career.

The draw came to his rescue. Galway had four weeks to get ready for a trip to Wicklow. The next round was more significant in that it brought together two teams in the one last-chance saloon. It was known that after the Armagh-Galway match, one management team would be stepping down. In the end there was just a point in it - Armagh had timed their run too late. Brian Canavan and Brian McAlinden duly stepped down and Galway went on the win an All-Ireland title.

Armagh may not have done the same had they won but it wouldn't be stretching the imagination to say that they could have reached an All-Ireland final. Luck will still play a major part in the outcome of this year's championship.

Some improvements have been made to the format in that teams who have already played in the championship will be kept apart in the qualifier rounds and up to All-Ireland semi-final stage. This will prevent the awful damp squib that the quarter-finals became last year with three of the ties repeating earlier fixtures.