Locker Room: This is the time of the year to start rambling out. Up to Donnycarney yesterday for Dublin and Kilkenny. It was harshly cold, but compared to the afternoon in Freshford last year when the sides met at the same stage of the Walsh Cup it was tropical.

Hard to know what these Walsh Cup games mean to Kilkenny, or even if they remember them the next day. Last year in Freshford they put out a scratch team and won. The previous year in the final they seemed to go for it, selection-wise, and lost.

Yesterday, they squeaked it playing with a strong, interesting side who looked as if they'd just been re-introduced to their hurleys after a long separation. Afterwards Brian Cody didn't look like he was going to be going on the batter to celebrate a famous victory.

Dublin, understandably, make more of these winter meetings than they should. If you can convince yourself you are within a point of Kilkenny in January it helps you get through the winter and into the summer when Kilkenny re-emerge and are suddenly 25 points a better side.

A couple of winters ago when Dublin beat Kilkenny in the Walsh Cup final nobody saw the result as the high point of the plans which existed for the metropolis. It was base camp. Something had been secured. Time to move on. Marty Morris had set out a team which was hard to beat. There was still work to be done. Dublin were on their way.

Yesterday Dublin lost and could claim they might have won. Still, you didn't come away with the impression you had seen a side on its way up to the mountain top.

Last year in Freshford, Cody gave Cha Fitzpatrick his first run out. Yesterday Richie Power and John Tennyson's assured debuts suggested they'll feel the sun on their backs in Croke Park this year.

That's three blue chip players coming through in the space of 12 months. Dublin have lost that many and more. That Walsh Cup win of 2003 looms like Everest in the rear mirror now.

The defection of Conal Keaney left such widespread bruising that it concealed other wounds. Losing Stephen Perkins from the defence has been a massive blow. David O'Callaghan opted for hurling over football last year and has changed back again this year. Kevin Flynn, who as recently as the 2002 championship scored 2-17 in three games, has been mislaid. There's more than those four gone, of course, but those losses are the most grievous.

Add O'Callaghan and Keaney to the long list of fine hurlers already playing big ball with the county and you face the possibility that the best hurling team in Dublin is the county football team. Is this the football team's fault? Nope.

As such it was a pleasant surprise to see Dublin battling hard yesterday. The bulletins from Dublin hurling training sessions are better now than they were before Christmas, but then they could hardly have got any worse. When the game was close you longed to see what would happen if Dublin were playing with a team comprising the best 15 hurlers in the county instead of seven genuine intercounty players and eight triers.

At this stage, hurling people will be wondering when we are going to move on to discussion of Kilkenny, shedding light in curiosities like Ryall at centre back, Hickey in the corner, Martin Comerford in midfield and Lyng at centre forward.

We're not. If they are in those spots come summer we will obligingly eat our hat.

Hurling people outside of Dublin may regard the metropolitans (as they used to be called) as small potatoes and feel that a return to the days when the All-Ireland was basically a triangular tournament would be just fine. So be it. Dublin hurling has been ailing for so long you can't expect the rest of the world to pay vigil by the bedside.

Close your eyes, though, for just a minute and picture a Dublin hurling side in Croke Park on All-Ireland day. Imagine the incredible boost it would provide for the game. The hope it would give, the stars it would create, the coverage it would provoke.

On the pitch in Parnell Park yesterday Henry Shefflin took the best part of 25 minutes to get to the gate so besieged was he by the hordes of kids who had hurls and sliotars and programmes for him to sign.

Cody's progress was just as slow. Both of them were gracious and generous to a fault. At one stage, though, Shefflin signed the back of a Dublin jersey and said "I hope I'll see you playing in a real Dublin jersey in a few years time" and without pause or cockiness the young owner of the jersey replied "yeah, probably for the footballers". And, at that moment, daydreams about those kids having their own Henry Shefflin to worship and to watch from the Hill evaporated.

We're nowhere near that day. Keaney left the stage saying, in as nice a way as he could, that Humphrey Kelleher hasn't got the brass cojones for managing a county senior team.

You could almost feel his unease at saying those words. It's a difficult thing to be harsh on Kelleher, who is as nice and decent a man as you could meet. Everyone who has encountered him over the past year or so has come away wishing that things would go well for him.

Sometimes, though, it takes a hard tough man to change things. Lar Foley had far less talent at his disposal in the early 1990s than any manager since then, but he brought Dublin to successive Leinster finals. Lar had something else, though. It was easier to run headlong through a brick wall than it was to face Lar with an excuse for not running headlong through a brick wall.

No player would have initiated a survey of panellists' views on Lar Foley in the wake of a championship defeat. No player would have stood and suggested that Lar might have been the problem and not the solution. No player would have dared tell Lar he was quitting to do something else. No player would have taken off to America on the eve of a big championship game.

When those things happen they erode a manager's authority and it takes a remarkable act of will to get it back. Maybe Kelleher can pull it off. Maybe he's standing in a room in which his voice carries not enough weight. At least his side pulled for him yesterday. It was a start.

Humphrey will argue that at least he has a vision and that his departure would change nothing short term. Perhaps he's right. Hurling is treated like the ugly sister in Dublin. People are generally unabashed about that.

Structures. Will. Imagination. Energy. Urgency. All missing.

What initiatives and blueprints there have been are swept with a roll of the eyes into a filing cabinet marked 'yadda, yadda, yadda'.

Hurling is a hardy flower, though. Players grow from the arid ground anyway. They need the support. They need something to sustain them.

Hurling in Dublin needs to create a hurling county within a football county. Twelve to 14 clubs giving equal footing to the game with separate hurling sections and hurling directors within each club. A commitment to end the redundant romance of dual players, and recognition that being a top hurler is a 40 game a year job. Dublin clubs need grants and sponsors to travel to the country weekend after weekend and play anyone in Kilkenny or Wexford who will play them.

They need sponsors and bar takings and whatever the county board will kick to head-hunt decent full-time hurling coaches and to create a roster of volunteers who would go in once a month to coach in primary schools, to involve big-name players from other counties in regular visits to those schools.

Will it happen? Nope.

The greatest sport in the world is dying in Dublin while people wait for something to happen. We get development squads patched hopefully on to a crumbling edifice.

Yesterday in Parnell Park was depressing and encouraging in about equal measure. You could say that a narrow Walsh Cup defeat is just the tip of the iceberg, but you'd be wrong.

Icebergs have all their substance beneath the surface and out of sight. Dublin has very little going on underneath.

That's the real problem.