The joys of hurling for Galway. You flick on the sports shows and wonder if maybe they forgot to include your county in the draw. It's not inconceivable given the hours you've clocked up over the past few summers.

Hurling and this thing called the championship is all the rage, a trendily-packaged super-sport and the thrust of summer talk across Munster and Leinster. But in Galway the hurlers train on lonesome fields and listen to the quiet. Mid-July and they are still sharpening their wands.

"It does get frustrating alright," admits forward Kevin Broderick.

"You put in all this training and once the league ends, there is nothing to look forward to for so long. You see all the other teams out there playing and naturally, it makes you itch. I suppose sometimes it makes you wish that they would just throw Galway into the Munster draw and let us take our chances from there."

The joys of hurling for Galway. Time was when the pundits would whisper the name and label the team as dark horses. In September 1993 they fell to a venerable Kilkenny team and gave on-field assurances that they were around for the long haul. We continued to watch and their geography betrayed them. Asked to start sprinting from cold, their hopes have since been plundered on an annual basis by teams from the more seasoned provinces. Clare, Offaly, Wexford, Waterford, all have lined up and cut strips off them. We stopped expecting anything other than an early exit.

Last summer was a case in point. Waterford, on fire after a rejuvenating run through Munster, raced onto Croke Park for an All-Ireland quarter-final meeting with Galway. They blitzed the westerners from the throw in.

"They were just so much sharper. Playing the game at a different pace than us," recalls Broderick.

Galway went home shell-shocked and Cyril Farrell stepped away from the helm. In came Mattie Murphy, a scapegoat from the 1996 trauma against Wexford, who scalped a fancied Galway team in that year's semi-final. It was Broderick's first championship Sunday with the seniors.

"The bottom line is that Wexford played better than us and deserved their win. Naturally you think about games like that and wonder why we didn't perform. It's hard to know. But there have been plenty of times I've wondered about matches like that," he says.

Broderick is in many ways emblematic of the perceived contradiction of Galway hurling. A stylist with pace to burn, he was a kid with a nose for winning, taking minor honours in 1994 and an under-21 medal two seasons later. Young and gifted. The pick of a county apparently littered with under-age talent. Why, the public demanded, wasn't it showing at senior level?

This year, Mattie Murphy has asked only for time and points out that this Galway team is still young.

True, and they've had their fingers burnt already so who could blame them for approaching this year guardedly?

"Preparations are going fairly well. Right now we aren't looking past Sunday and I mean that," says Murphy, who is hoping to avoid the big guns in the next round of the draw.

Broderick was in shining form over the dark months, averaging three points from play over the league and productive in the loose. He is the embodiment of the modern Galway hurler - light, skill-laden, lightening fast. Now though, the attack has been bolstered by the return of two targetmen, Joe Rabbitte and that brilliant relic from the silverware days, Joe Cooney.

"Ahh yeah, it's great to see them back about the place," laughs Broderick.

"Two great players, it's given us all a lift. They are both big, strong ball-winners, very hard to dispossess and will hopefully give us options in the games ahead."

The joys of hurling for Galway. The world sees you as purists who just don't turn it on. First half against Kilkenny in 1997 and you put on this dazzling clinic. Second half hour and you seem to wither.

Objectivity has gone out the window when it comes to judging Galway. Maybe it's because people want to see them do well, this enigmatic bunch caught by quirks of border. But this year, there are no promises.

"We've been caught like that before," says Broderick, 22 and old enough to know caution.