LockerRoom/Tom HumphriesEvents down in the animal Kingdom tended to distract this week from the real business of looking forward to the summer. Given the one-eyed parochialism that makes the GAA such a great organisation this column has been wondering if it might bend minds and ask people to nominate the county they would most like to win the All-Ireland hurling championship if their own county didn't win it.

Surprisingly, not many people nominate Dublin. Most people outside the Pale profess to having had a bellyful of us and our footballers. Last thing they need is some hurling Dubs strutting the stage like peacocks. Well fasten your girdle, Bridie, because it's going to happen.

Not this year, probably, but sometime soon. And it will be the greatest boost the game of hurling has gotten since plastic hurls went out of fashion.

There has been a changing of the guard at the management end of the Dublin hurlers and if the names aren't well known outside the county they are all at least good hurling men who know the game inside the county. And the appointment of a director of hurling is expected soon. If the county board get the big name they are chasing he could do more for hurling by reviving the game here in Dublin than he did even through his own sparkling career.

So there's a change, but there's also a realisation. Hurling people have been talking and have been meeting. The sort of meetings that people will look back on after an All-Ireland win and argue it all started back then.

There are blueprints and plans. Long-term stuff and short term. Short term? Even with the dwindling numbers playing the game it can't be impossible to get a competitive senior hurling team together. It's a matter of wanting to.

Key to the discussion usually is the relationship of the county hurling team to the county football team. This goes right to the heart of hurling's problems. Everybody loves a dual player. At some stage or other almost everybody in the GAA was a dual player and we like to say it never did us any harm. And what's more insiderish than turning to somebody from another county and pointing at John Joe Midfielder and saying "he's actually a better hurler, lovely hurler on his day".

If Dublin could only put out a hurling team comprised of footballers of whom it has been said that they are actually better hurlers, they would be unbeatable.

I think the time has come to stop dwelling on the dual player problem and just get on with life. The worrying thing about the state of hurling at the moment in Dublin and the thing that most needs changing is the sense that hurling feels sorry for itself. The sense that nothing can happen until football ceases to be glamorous in the city or until the football team gets a manager who is just as worried about hurling.

Everytime a player like Shane Ryan walks off the hurling panel and into the football panel there is a beating of the chest and prayers for the salvation of his soul. And sure it's a worry. Between Ryan, Conal Keaney, Daithi O'Callaghan, Liam Óg Ó hEineacháin and Tomás Quinn the county could lose five fine hurlers in the space of a few years. It's not the end of the world, though.

Even though Dublin is unique in that hurling always loses out in dual player situations, nobody is prepared to abandon the notion of the dual player. So the time has come to work around the problem. The time has come to just get on with it and stop enviously looking over into the other field at the footballers.

First, it has to be accepted that no matter how glamorous the Dublin football team is they aren't going to have more than 30 players on their panel. That leaves quite a number of hurlers. Use them. Promote them. Pamper them. Fund them. And argue for a structure to intercounty hurling that gets them games in the summertime.

If a player won't or can't give preference to hurling, well that's fine. It's better to have a seven out of 10 hurler giving it 100 per cent week in and week out than to have a nine out of 10 hurler giving it 60 per cent whenever he can.

Playing week in and week out the seven out of 10 guy should be an eight out of 10 guy in time. There was a time when Brian Lohan himself thought he'd never wear a Clare jersey again. Players develop through playing.

Second, if Dublin is to be a serious hurling county, then hurling within the county has to be serious. If it's serious the dual player problem will die anyway. A good senior hurler should be getting between 25 and 30 games in from early March to late October. There are 35 weekends in that period plus the potential for midweek games in high summer. Give them games. Give them tournaments with clubs from stronger counties. Give them challenges. Make them hurl.

None of this of course is new or original. This column claims no credit for the ideas herein. Stocks may rise and fall, etc. The ideas that are being bandied about are worth restating though. Any ideas are worth an airing at this stage because whatever happens over the next year or so, well at least something is going to happen, at least responsibility will be taken.

What Dublin hurling needs is certainty and enthusiasm now. No more dawdling and no more regrets.

Wouldn't it be nice to look at the big tracts of west Dublin and Tallaght the GAA has lost out in and decide to grow and fund a few clubs there that would be primarily hurling clubs. Buy the fields, stick the coaches into the schools and clubs, provide the grassroots cash. The whole shebang. We might, with a smile, say in a few years' time of such places, "Oh it's all hurling out there."

Personally I would campaign for the Government to outlaw rugby in Dublin boarding schools. We need schools that will be virtual academies of hurling.

Boarding schools have always taken well to the game and it is one of the tragedies of the city's upper class that they aren't sufficiently enlightened to have adopted hurling as their game. If you could remove the D4 element from rugby and promote Dublin hurling at the same time you would have performed a service for both sports.

And the coaches. There are almost five times as many skills to be taught to young hurlers as there are to young Gaelic footballers. I know people who would argue that all a player needs to know about pulling and dragging can be taught in one short session. So why isn't the policy of the Dublin County Board reversed and twice as many hurling coaches appointed as football coaches? The game desperately needs to re-establish itself in the school system.

Right now though, thanks to the work of a few good people, I don't think Dublin is further off an All-Ireland than Clare were, say, three or four years before 1995. If fans down in the animal Kingdom are intolerant of failure, hurling people here in Dublin have been too accommodating. The times though, the times they are a changing. Hop aboard and start demanding success.