On Gaelic Games: And the championship's here. Once the GAA world had finished twitching after the massive dual shocks of last Sunday, it wasn't long before the real sign of summer emerged, writes Seán Moran.

Surprise results are all very well and provide an exhilarating rush - astonishment and schadenfreude in equal measure - but the real indicator that we're off for another season is the crisis.

There are run-of-the-mill crises, like injuries, disciplinary matters and quality of play, and there are big ones. This week's, maybe this season's, is falling attendances.

What are we doing with an 80,000 stadium - to say nothing of all those medium-size ones being maintained around the country? Eeek! Maybe no one's interested in this stuff any more.

The rush to detect crisis is actually one phenomenon that can in part be attributed to media. Such is the intense interest in the championships that many of us covering them are quick to try to identify trends whose significance we can inflate according to the copy requirements of the day.

But such portentousness is only one aspect of it. The GAA is also about disproportionate response.

Partisanship leads people to say ludicrous things when their own county's interests are at stake. In the middle of a suspension "crisis" one county official told me in all seriousness that whereas "dirty play" was wrong, "giving and taking a few belts was all part of the game".

A bemused friend of mine was told that incidents in the recent Kilkenny-Tipperary NHL match in Nowlan Park were all to the good. Why? Because it was great to see fellas taking the league that seriously. The GAA's new marketing committee, take note.

Michael Delaney, secretary of the Leinster Council, bucks the trend in this respect. His provincial council has generally been a by-word for reasoned response and a sense of proportion. If he hits out - as he did over the disgracefully ill-considered response to the Strategic Review Committee report at last October's special congress - there is reason to pay attention.

In yesterday's Irish Independent, Delaney was unfazed by the 17,142 that turned up to Sunday's Leinster triple bill at Croke Park. And rightly so. Being able to mount the province's entire preliminary round on the one afternoon in the one place was administratively neat and allowed six counties and their supporters a run in the new stadium.

Certainly it would have cost the council - even if Croke Park agreed in advance to take some of the hit - but the decision had been made to treat the event as a promotional venture. After all, 11,000 free juvenile tickets were distributed in advance, although it's neither known whether all of these were availed of or to what extent they attracted children who wouldn't have been going anyway.

In terms of the crowd, Delaney pointed out that the numbers were actually better than might have been expected had they gone ahead as planned at separate provincial venues.

The six counties playing at the weekend were involved in five first-round matches last year, which attracted a total attendance of 23,000 - 6,000 more than Sunday, but a figure that includes the Dublin-Wexford match in Carlow, where 8,000 attended, plus a Louth-Longford replay staged on a 5,000 double bill in Navan with the Meath-Laois hurling preliminary. Even including Dublin the average per match is higher this year.

Over the past three years the total attendances at Leinster preliminary matches have been 15,000 (2002: Laois-Wicklow, Westmeath-Carlow and Louth-Longford twice), 11,000 (2001: Carlow-Wicklow, Longford-Louth and Laois-Wexford) and 11,200 (2000: a round-robin involving Longford, Wexford, Wicklow and Carlow).

There has been an amount of agonising over the poor crowds that have been seen at headquarters in the past couple of weeks. This started with the league finals, but there was little remarkable one way or the other about the size of those crowds. The overflow of agitation carried into the championship, despite the above evidence that the Leinster crowd was actually above normal.

The turnout in Munster for Limerick's first championship defeat of Cork since 1965, and only second ever, was poor at around 6,000. But since when have bad attendances in Cork been news? The 1999 NFL final pulled in a "crowd" of less than 10,000 at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The last time the counties met in Cork was four years ago and 5,616 attended. It could be argued that Limerick were no-hopers back then, but in May 2000, just after Limerick had been in the All-Ireland under-21 final, the attendance in Kilmallock for the visit of Cork was 6,567. In other words, in Munster, unless it's Kerry - and not always even then - Cork football supporters don't want to know.

The tendency to blame the dilution of the knockout format - to which Delaney himself strangely seemed to subscribe despite having described the Leinster turnout as "quite a good crowd" - overlooks the evidence of the last six years.

Since the first chink in knock-out's armour allowed beaten Leinster and Munster hurling finalists back into the championship six years ago, attendances at those finals have been unaffected. Lack of competition in Leinster has depressed crowds, but that's a different matter - and one on which Delaney has made public his concern.

The point was also made that the seismic defeats of Cork and Armagh would mean more if both counties were off the field for the rest of the season, that in some way it's unfair to Limerick and Monaghan that their victims may hang around, potentially to haunt them.

Leave aside the daftness of designing a format which sidelines top teams after one day of the season. Leave aside the Alice in Wonderland logic that suggests a championship should facilitate one-off displays at the expense of consistent performance.

Such arguments also refuse to quantify the extent to which the availability of the qualifiers psychologically liberates underdogs from the pressures of sudden death and helps them perform.

Limerick manager Liam Kearns paid tribute to the system on Sunday when he said: "The qualifiers helped us big time. They gave us confidence last year."

Hopefully there'll be more shocks and more teams emerging into the spotlight. The crowds will come, and then we'll have to discover other crises.