With this year's absence of Setanta Ó hAilpín, Tom Humphries believes the game needs a new hero to emerge.

The issue isn't about the location of the beef. We need to know where to find the sizzle? As hurling threatens to slide back to being an annual squabble between traditional aristocracies, we yearn for some novelty. On the eve of championship it sinks in, how badly we miss Setanta Ó hAilpín. Cork specifically. Hurling generally. He's like a missing limb. Occasionally when about the business of the blood and bandage Seán Óg will hit a long, raking diagonal ball from left-wing back to right-corner still expecting a brotherly arm to rise up and seize the sliotar like Excalibur.

Instead the ball drops turfwards and becomes quarry for a 50-50 contest, a poor testament to Seán Óg's drive and vision.

Cork will contend this year because they have too much hurling in them and too smart a manager pushing them to do anything else but they'll contend by working around the absence of their big man rather than replacing him. On big days they'll miss the goals he filched, the panic he sowed, the passion he generated.

The league has been like a casting call for replacements. At the end of it all it looks as if the job will be shared out. Jonathan O'Callaghan gets to fill the number 13 shirt this weekend and, when aggregated, his league form probably earned it. Breathing down his neck will be Kieran Murphy of Sarsfields, while the whole full-forward line could change shape when Brian Corcoran gets to full fitness or Eamon Collins becomes the players he threatens to be.

Even if those things happen Cork will miss Setanta. They will wonder what the fully-blossomed talent would have been like. He leaves behind the impression of a jet trail whitening a line across the sky before vanishing.

And hurling misses him too. The dash. The exuberance. This should have been the difficult second season, of course, and perhaps our familiarity (and that of most corner backs) with Setanta's bag of tricks would have diminished his magic but it's his presence we miss most any way. Hurling needed a poster boy. Hurling needed a face which beamed from billboards and a body over which the faithful could argue.

The game needs another player who makes you quicken your step towards the field.

The cognoscenti, the purists, the Pharisees - they'll miss him too. They'll miss having somebody to point at, somebody to diminish by way of accusations about media hype and wanton good looks and detailed comparisons with men now old or dead.

They'll miss whinging that he played for fouls or tugged his jersey for histrionics or clenched his fists theatrically and was generally a thousand times more animated than a hurler is supposed to be.

And those who believe Setanta would have made a lasting impact on the field know the media hype and the good looks and the commercial impact were just the froth which the game needs right now as it heads towards one of those periods of consolidation where the second-rank counties need to feel the pain and regroup and regird themselves while the old blue-bloods roll on.

After a run of fine harvests which have thrown up extraordinary young players the game faces a relatively barren year.

Recent crops have included Setanta, Tommy Walsh, Tony Óg Regan, not one but two Eoin Kellys, Andrew O'Shaugnessy, Patrick Kirby, Diarmuid MacMahon, Conal Keaney and others.

We have grown accustomed to them though and they to us.

This summer brings little prospect of similar riches. True Kilkenny on their never-ending run of underage and schools successes have players like Cha Fitzpatrick, Donnacha Cody, Richie Hogan, Brian Hogan and Richie Power in the holding pattern just outside the senior team but the novelty of black and amber prodigies has palled for the rest of us.

Kilkenny do so much that is right with their structures and their hurling culture that good young players are as inevitable for them as expensive signings are for Real Madrid.

If it has become a truism that the most competitive games Kilkenny play for most of the year are those which take place in training between the perpetually hungry and the nervously insecure, the depth of strength in the county itself and the management's sympathetic view of club matters mean the ordinary hurling scene is a cut above anything else too. The system self-perpetuates just by means of so many people wanting to be part of it.

It is elsewhere that the summer seems skinniest and hurling's evident popularity seems most wasted. The superficial evidence on any bright evening is that the game is hugely popular with youngsters right now but that well-spring of interest is being wasted by virtue of lousy structures and insular thinking.

Dublin have their best minor team since 1983 this year but it will take a season or two for the best of them to percolate through. Beyond that, in the city which spawns more hurling blueprints than it does titles, it is the usual case of one step forward, two steps back with Diarmuid Healy recently having been lost to the cause and the pre-eminence of football choking supply lines. Offaly are static right now and the introduction last year of the impressive Michael Cordial seems unlikely to be matched this year.

Wexford have more goings and comings these times and recent, half-decent under-21 sides have already been stripped bare. Limerick's gifted generation of underage starlets need some remedial work if they are to be anything but a busted flush and Clare under Anthony Daly will be tough and tart but not especially youthful.

Waterford seem to have just about 15 viable hurlers at any given time and Paul O'Brien's splash of 3-2 against Dublin in the league appears to have been put down to the home side's ineptitude more than anything else.

There's Galway, of course, for whom good minor teams are as much a way of life as wasting good minor teams is. They'll put out a fresh-complexioned side but not one containing a debutant about to streak across the firmament like a comet.

So too with Tipperary, trying to relocate the spirit of three years ago and find a credible full forward at the same time.

The summer will throw up its share of good games and perhaps the occasional great game but the stir and the simmer is caused by youth and novelty. As it stands we have precious little chance of seeing a breakthrough county emerge this year.

And the sky will remain unstreaked by blithe young geniuses.

We'll beat on regardless.