Seán Moran highlights how this year's championship structure enshrines the disparity between the provinces.

By the standards of the past three years the Guinness All-Ireland hurling championship is ear-marked for Galway. The recent convergence of league and championship that has seen three successive doubles won by Kilkenny, twice, and Tipperary has focused enhanced attention on the spring competition.

The league has become accepted as a more reliable indicator of a county's summer potential. It has its limitations, as demonstrated by Tipperary's apparent vigour 12 months ago and how it was refuted within weeks, but that is part of another, interesting trend.

Over the past three years the league finalists have gone on to lose in the first round of the championship.

This suggests - allowing for injuries and suspensions - the blow to morale inflicted by losing a league final is every bit as abiding as the momentum generated by winning it.

We will know this weekend whether Waterford can break this sequence, which would seem to make reaching National Hurling League finals a high-risk venture.

There has been plenty of comment on the fact Waterford will have had to play two critical matches in the space of a week but that hasn't been the reason behind the failure of recent finalists, who have had respectively, two, three and four weeks to recover.

It is of course daft that a county can define their season in the space of eight days whereas last week's winners Galway have a six-week break before their championship starts. The current structure is of course superior to its predecessors in that Waterford, should they lose, will still have one last shot at the championship through the qualifiers.

But there remains a feeling that teams who endure early setbacks become damaged goods in the qualifier series. Evidence on this point is underdeveloped after only two years of the system but whereas Clare rehabilitated magnificently in 2002 and reached the All-Ireland, both of last year's qualifiers - Wexford admittedly after a replay - went down to heavy defeats against the Munster and Leinster champions.

This is another historic year for the evolution of the hurling championship in that the reforms introduced by last month's Congress mean the format devised by the Hurling Development Committee will come into effect next year. This will make it the fourth different structure to be introduced in the previous 10 years of hurling championships.

Few will argue against the suggestion that each new structure has been better than what went before. That trend will be maintained next year when further moves are made to establish a championship in which teams play the same number of matches.

That ideal won't be fully realised until a league format is imported into the championship, providing for all counties a competition that begins and concludes at the same time at each succeeding stage.

Last month gave us a glimpse of how exciting and unpredictable that can be when the decision on the finalists went to the last weekend with five of the six teams still in with a chance of qualifying.

Back on earth, however, the coming championship enshrines the disparity between the provinces. Munster is extremely competitive whereas Leinster is not.

Going for a third successive All-Ireland, Kilkenny are also seeking to extend their record of consecutive Leinster titles to seven, historical proof of the dire competitive circumstances of the province. Given the mileage on the clock the champions should be slightly vulnerable and in the national context they probably are, but in Leinster the prospects of any likely opposition have receded.

Noises from both Wexford and Offaly aren't encouraging. John Conran's team bounced back well from last year's mauling in the Leinster final but being drawn against Kilkenny from the off seems to have depressed the mood within the county. They're capable of recovery but will that be enough?

Offaly have a question mark over their best young player, Rory Hanniffy, who may or may not be back for the Leinster final and that's assuming the team can reverse embarrassing League defeats by Laois and Dublin.

Cork are the most obvious candidates in Munster but all of the other counties except Limerick (back to the drawing board for the third successive year) and of course Kerry have a chance. The trouble for the Munster champions is that they have lost key personnel from last year and have form concerns about others.

Waterford mightn't look in great shape after last week's league final undermined the suggestion that they're a harder, more determined outfit than previously. The fact they won the title before means they can't be entirely written off although in truth they haven't given one remotely comparable championship performance since the Munster final of two years ago and have shed players to retirement, most noticeably Fergal Hartley.

Clare's moderated training regime under the supervision of Johnny Glynn is highly regarded in the county and Anthony Daly is both inspirational and serious about the job so discipline will be better, but the search for forwards has resulted in conversion jobs and few new faces. They're not out of the question though.

Last year was notable for the drastic decline of Tipperary between spring and summer and it's hard to see where things have improved dramatically. The return of Philip Maher is one big plus but there are a lot of imponderables from rookie centre back Declan Fanning to the loss of form amongst the class of 2001.

All of which leaves Galway, whose progress was both rewarded and a little flattered by the league final.

So far the credentials in the full lines are excellent but in between is still open to question. How, for instance, would the half backs get on against Kilkenny at championship pelt when they string Comerford, Shefflin and Hoyne across the line? The summer can develop teams exponentially, as Cork indicated last year. Kilkenny may have come back to the pack but the pack, with the exception of Galway, have backed off.

So the choice from here looks like being between the champions and Galway. And three-in-a-rows are terribly hard to do.