The Galway bench in Birr on Sunday featured a familiar face. Former Clare trainer Michael McNamara returned to competitive intercounty hurling as part of Noel Lane's new management team. The move to a county traditionally dependent on the National League for match practice represents quite a change for someone used to choreographing Clare's inscrutable spring antics.

Early indications are that the Clare influence is strong, as Galway went down to a heavy and unexpected defeat by Offaly. McNamara's scepticism about the league is mildly expressed: he simply doesn't believe that the competition should disrupt a team's championship focus.

"There is a balancing act," he says. "The public in Galway have maybe had a bellyfull of the league. The county has been contesting it ferociously over the years but then coming up short in the championship. I think there's a realisation that there's more to life than the league.

"The additional matches involved in reaching the play-offs are worthwhile because decent matches are key to preparation for the championship. But it's not the be-all and end-all."

For someone whose legendarily demanding training sessions were designed to bring Clare to a peak of fitness in early summer, Galway's requirements vary considerably. He argues that the team should have its own distinct biorhythms - with inevitable consequences.

"Training demands are slightly different. I'm used to getting a team ready for the end of May. Galway don't have to be ready for the championship until the July 29th. It's a very strange situation.

"So we're at a different stage of preparation to other teams. Most of them should be two months further on than we are and have to be doing some type of hurling.

"I'm not making excuses. Offaly hurled well and looked a lot more advanced than we did. But they have a county final coming up and a lot of players involved in that, so they would be sharper."

McNamara feels there are good, practical reasons for not fully committing to the spring competition. And the recent record of league winners in championship - only three wins in serious fixtures in the last 10 years - supports his suspicions.

"Galway are traditionally a league team and have tended to hit it hard and maybe forget the bigger picture, even for the best of reasons. There seems to be a jinx on that and not just for Galway, for any team that wins the league.

"It's as if league winners are getting their timing wrong - ending up in a valley period after winning it and not being able to pull themselves out of it. It's unlikely any trainer can get a team to peak twice in a season."

He says Clare would like to have won the league - but not at the expense of championship preparation. Yet a failure by Galway to at least qualify for the knockout stages would create a major problem for McNamara in terms of his training schedules.

"If Galway don't make it to the knockout stages, it leaves us a gap of 17 weeks to the first round of the championship. It's a massive gap and hard to train players because they have two months of watching the championship in full swing and all the top players performing and you're trying to hold them back.

"Even if we reach the final (of the league) there's still 13 weeks until the end of July. But the players aren't idle. Unlike in Clare the county championship will go on and it's played on a league basis so everyone gets games. From a training point of view, it's stopstart because you have to break and pick it up again."

For all the reservations, McNamara has factored the later stages of the league into his timetable for the season ahead. But the focus remains unaltered.

"All the players have been handed a training programme which takes them up to July 29th. It includes the league semi-finals and final as well as when we'd like the county championship matches to be played - although that's a matter for the county board.

"The purpose is to produce a team in its best shape for the end of July but to be able to build on that for the All-Ireland semi-finals and final."

Since starting to train the team, McNamara has been on what he calls "a tour of Galway". Sessions have been held all around the county; currently the work is all physical and all outdoors. He prefers to use gymnasium work to address individual needs.

And are Galway going through the fabled afflictions of Crusheen? "The regime is probably as severe as in Clare but I've stretched it out a little bit longer. You learn a bit in management as you go along. I'm probably not hitting it as hard in the sledgehammer way I used to."