LockerRoom: So, like the a grainy old western, the hurling summer comes down to the shootout scenes. Four teams, three games, and while the main characters are still standing you wouldn't bet the ranch against Cork or Kilkenny getting bumped off the next day.

You can see the big boys getting a little jumpy. Last weekend, after his side had dispatched Waterford for the second time this season, John Allen joked that he hoped Cork would be able to give Clare a game.

They will, and they'll start out as favourites, but the All-Ireland champions are in an odd situation in that they haven't played as well this season as they did last year and are just beginning to wonder if they can access that level at the touch of a button.

And yesterday the Kilkenny dressingroom remained closed for the longest time as we stood outside and wondered what Brian Cody was saying to his boys. Whatever it was, it didn't bring smiles to their faces as they trooped out the back way. Kilkenny were flat and insipid yesterday and beat Limerick as an act of reflex in the end. Made you wonder.

Cork haven't been on this block as long as Kilkenny have, but both sides look a little weary this summer. Cork, perhaps, have the added wrinkle that they don't have the luxury of refreshing their squad with three or four new faces every season. You never know quite when tiredness in the bones turns to ennui, or when what looks like a once-off game will turn out to be the beginning of a pattern.

Cork had the odd experience last weekend of seeing their half-back line look a little anaemic in the second half, and they needed to depend on a full-back line where Pat Mulcahy and Brian Murphy, in particular, stepped it up.

It's not usually that way, and it meant that at various times this summer key parts of the Cork team have gone missing.

The half-back crisis wasn't especially alarming or anywhere near a complete collapse, but at various stages there have been difficulties with the half-forward line and midfield.

It's getting to the stage where you need every line to be working, and Cork must be wondering somewhere in the back of their heads if a day will come when several lines malfunction.

Anthony Daly, who was in the press box in Croker yesterday (are we to have no privacy?) will have watched it all with some interest. Cork's troubles are Clare's opportunity. Clare brushed Wexford aside with comparative ease just before Cork and Waterford came out as the main event last week.

It may be the case that these days Wexford can only get riled by the sight of a black and amber jersey and are limp the rest of the time, but the nature of Clare's win, coming hard as it did upon their demolition of Waterford, will have sown a little self-belief into a team who have discovered that, unlike their more celebrated predecessors, they have more than one forward to choose from.

Plucking Barry Nugent from the colleges game was a good day's work, and fully fit he will cause problems in a few weeks. Tony Griffin gets better as the summer rolls on and his self-imposed exile in Nova Scotia recedes, while Tony Carmody is shaping well.

What's pleasing for Clare is that they are big men who can win their own ball and take their share of scores.

There must have been times this year, especially against Tipperary, when young Micheál Webster so impudently pulled Brian Lohan's tail, when Daly wondered if he'd been ruthless enough or if he knew enough to know what was the real Clare. He is haunted still by the hiding Clare got early in his first summer in charge, and seeing Tipp nourishing themselves this summer must have given him shivers.

Clare are sharkish though in the matter of smelling blood in the water. There's enough about them to suggest they'll thunder into Cork.

And Lohan on Corcoran at the edge of the square. The famous red helmet may not lift crowds as it once did, but that's the sort of clash you'd sell pay-per-view packages for.

Yesterday's fare told us little and entertained us not much more. Limerick earlier this year, when they hit Crisis 87 in a series which seems endless, looked unlikely to cause any great stir, and they arrived in Croke Park having already lost two and drawn one of their previous championship games.

Their two successes came against Laois and Antrim, who ungraciously put that achievement into context in Saturday's relegation battle when Laois ensured they would not have to languish in the twilight zone of the Christy Ring Cup next year.

Limerick came and played to something approaching the limit of their immense potential, and if afterwards Joe McKenna sounded like a man keen on turning a short-term arrangement into a longer-term engagement, you couldn't blame him.

Limerick haven't beaten a heavyweight side in four seasons now, but they were just a point off Galway and Tipp this year and worried Kilkenny for the guts of the game.

Time and a little luck will serve them well, and in Peter Lawlor they have a defender of extraordinary quality who should be in the running for an All Star this year.

But what about Kilkenny?

As usual, given that they are the Manchester United of their sport, rumours persist about unhappiness in the camp and about so-and-so having said this and that to you-know-who. All fantasy no doubt, but they don't look themselves down on the field, and when Limerick were allowed three wides in three minutes late in the game you wondered what had happened to the old ruthlessness.

Kilkenny headed home with the job done and with five points to spare in the end, but when we backed Brian Cody up against the wall afterwards we peppered him with questions about that second-half sequence when Limerick scored six points to Kilkenny's one. It took DJ Carey to shake them out of their languor.

Sufficient elements of the Kilkenny team looked flat and off key yesterday to make the Leinster champions look vulnerable.

Which is probably bad news for Galway, a team who, like Limerick, are at that stage where an inquest seems imminent as to what they have done with all their underage talent. They at least deferred that day by reaching an All-Ireland semi-final against the odds and without a raft of big names who have either been sent to the infirmary or to Coventry.

So the quarter-finals are done with. In a season laced with such forlorn inevitability, getting 100,000 people into Croke Park for the four games was no mean feat.

The upshot is a feeling that somewhere in August there's a twist in the tale awaiting us.

It's not often you get semi-finals contested by four teams all of whom have better in them. It's down to appetite and energy now, and perhaps the resident headliners, the gods of recent Septembers, are feeling the ache in their bones just a little.