On Gaelic Games:Losing confidence or self-belief is as treacherous to a hurler as it would be to a high-wire artist, writes SEÁN MORAN

FOR ALL the justifiable tributes to its high level of skills and potential for breathtaking contests, hurling is also a cruel game. There are few sports (allowing occasionally for football when Dublin are playing) in which a team’s self-worth can be as pitilessly ransacked as Limerick’s last weekend or Waterford’s nearly 12 months ago. That is partly because the skill-to-scoring ratio is so high, leaving inferior teams facing big differentials on the scoreboard, but there are also psychological hierarchies, inevitable in so traditional a game.

The technical and the mental considerations are entangled. Mastering the necessary skills is so instinctive and confidence-based a process that the knowledge of previous generations’ outstanding ability is both a comfort and a demanding standard.

Limerick don’t necessarily feel cowed by Tipperary and it’s only two years since they beat their neighbours in championship, but they’re also realists, knowing when they have a chance and equally conscious when things are going to be difficult. For them, the sight of Eoin Kelly scooting in for a self-inflicted goal on five minutes must have been as ominous as the bailiff’s thud on a struggling tenant farmer’s door.

There have been more than 170 distinct skills attributed to the game and if this sometimes owes a little to the desire to dwarf the corresponding number identifiable in football, it’s not fanciful. Other racket-or implement-based games may require high levels of skill and this can be seen in individual sports such as golf or tennis, but without the additional pressure of physical contact or the necessity of teamwork.

The old joke about the hurler looking at a golfer holing out for a major tournament holds: “Why wouldn’t he get it and no one near him?” It was Babs Keating who combined his two sporting passions to observe about Seán McMahon’s return from a broken collar bone sustained five weeks before the 1995 Munster final against Limerick: “Jockeys might do it in six – and they wouldn’t have Mike Houlihan charging at the shoulder as soon as they’re back.” (Clare famously bandaged McMahon’s good shoulder and the player’s durability and confidence under physical challenge led Limerick to lose interest in testing the extent of his recovery.)

Comparable field games like hockey and shinty incorporate many of the same skills and can at times be sniffy about the use of the hand in hurling but by contrast with the Gaelic game’s physicality and athleticism they can appear two-dimensional and overly stylised.

Applying skills to produce positive outcomes surrounded by the maelstrom of a match is a remarkable combination of technical ability, clear thinking and frequently courage. Losing confidence or self-belief is as treacherous to a hurler as it would be to a high-wire artist.

In behind Brád Tullaroan, the Lory Meagher Heritage centre based around the legendary Kilkenny hurler’s 17th-century family farmhouse there is an improvised pitch with goalposts made from branches and bark. Visiting it a few years ago I was told when Meagher’s modern heir Tommy Walsh was a schoolboy, he had participated in exhibition matches staged for the benefit of tourists.

There was a tranquil, other-worldly atmosphere in keeping with the myths of Meagher being spirited away in his sleep to compete in matches in the fairy world and the image was vivid of the young Walsh starring in a theme park before stepping out (like that scene in Field of Dreams) fully formed to go and contest All-Irelands for the county.

By timely coincidence, Walsh only a few weeks ago was among a small Kilkenny delegation to visit fellow Tullaroan man and former All-Ireland winner Martin White on the occasion of his 100th birthday in celebration of a life that extraordinarily included playing in the 1931 All-Ireland against Cork, a final that went to two replays and is credited with marking hurling’s transition into a major spectator sport.

These traditions – overpowering as they must appear to opponents – aren’t peculiar to Kilkenny, but they are very much restricted to the game’s big three. Cork, Tipperary and Kilkenny have between them won 86, or 71 per cent, of all All-Irelands.

Ten other counties share the remaining 35 and some of them, Kerry, London and Laois, aren’t likely to be bringing Liam MacCarthy home again anytime soon. In other words, the top counties average nearly 29 All-Irelands each whereas the rest of the hurling world averages 3.5.

For all of the coaching work that currently takes place and the despite the drive and enthusiasm of Paudie Butler, the national hurling co-ordinator, there is no sign that hurling’s elite are going to be under pressure from a more egalitarian world.

In fact, this is now confirmed as the first decade in GAA history in which the big three will have won all of the available All-Ireland titles. For those favouring the looser definition of a decade as any 10-year period, the shut-out has already happened with Kilkenny’s win last year maintaining a sequence started by Cork in 1999.

Two former elite players, who maintained their involvement, Tipperary’s Michael Cleary and Limerick’s Damien Quigley have in recent days in these pages offered bleak opinions on the future of the game, the latter again emphasising the challenge of rugby in Limerick city and the former convinced that the next 10 All-Irelands will be divided up between Tipp and Kilkenny with Galway the only possible interloper.

Cleary’s view is based on the all-too-evident superiority of the counties at under-age level and more crucially – as Limerick will attest – the ability to translate that into senior titles.

That Limerick under-21 three-in-a-row increasingly stands like an over-grown folly, striking in itself but irrelevant. The difficulties that beset some of those players would have been far less likely in the aristocratic counties, where multiple under-age success would not be a reason for indulgence or presumption.

But every championship must be played on its merits and although it’s hard to adjust the light sufficiently convincingly to cast a Tipp side going into an All-Ireland final as plucky underdogs, they will be outsiders. However it turns out, the final promises to be momentous, either bringing about the unexpected fall of a team increasingly spoken of as potentially the best in the game’s history or else franking that status. It’s life at the top, but that’s where hurling has always been played.