We all wait with trepidation to see if Grandmaster Loughnane will accept the decision of the GAC Parades Commission. Or if he is to resist what he clearly sees as the assault on his cultural identity, the traditional right to march down the Cusack sideline past embattled Offaly supporters who resent his triumphalist re-enactment of 1995.

It is probably something to do with Offaly's uninspiring form approaching Sunday's All-Ireland semi-final, but the lead-up to the match has been dominated by the consequences of Clare's various tangles with authority: Ger Loughnane in the stand, Brian Lohan, and possibly Colin Lynch, with him.

Loughnane himself has made no secret of his admiration for Meath football, its indomitability and its rugged disregard for the opinions of those who would criticise it. He could scarcely have realised how quickly he would be able to emulate them.

Within a couple of weeks of this profession of admiration, Loughnane and Clare found themselves in the thick of the sort of controversy that used to be the preserve of Meath. Leave aside the fallout from the All-Ireland replay with Mayo two years ago; parallels between the recent Munster hurling final and the All-Ireland football final of 1988 are even more striking.

After Meath had defeated Cork in the October replay of 10 years ago, there was an immediate and terrible public outrage. The champions had had a man, Gerry McEntee, sent off after six minutes and fell back on a spoiling game to cope with this disadvantage. In Clare's case, Brian Lohan was accompanied by opponent Michael White on his dismissal in the fourth minute, but the public reaction to Clare's tactics was as outraged as it had been in Meath's case.

Like their predecessors of 10 years ago, Clare quickly became embittered by what they saw as an imbalance in both the reactions of their opponents and the media.

The defence brief was remarkably similar: having been roughed out of it during the drawn match, they had met fire with fire in the replay and their asbestos had been more durable; whereupon instead of taking their beating, Cork/Waterford had whinged about the tactics those teams themselves had initiated; they - Meath/Clare - were being vilified and demonised.

There are two points worth considering about these comparisons. Firstly, there is nothing new under the sun. Nearly every one of the manifestations of truculence attributed to Clare this season have been in evidence over the past 20 years. In the 1970s and '80s, Kevin Heffernan frequently kept football followers on their toes by opting for late selections while releasing less reliable ones earlier in the week.

In 1985, (either the Leinster final against Laois or the All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo), Noel McCaffrey - dropped a few days earlier in a welter of comment - only made his starting intentions clear when slipping into the pre-match parade.

In terms of hurling, Clare remind you of no other team as much as Galway of the last 1980s. The emphasis on physical preparation and - as pointed out by Kevin Cashman in the weekend's Sunday Tribune - the orchestration of a grievance cult predicated on the hostility of the outside world are both reminiscent of Cyril Farrell's team.

Even the ramifications of this getting out of hand are familiar to anyone who remembers the saturnine semi-final between Tipperary and Galway nine years ago. In an atmosphere thick with ill-will created by their intense rivalry and the suspension of Tony Keady - which reportedly had Galway considering withdrawal from the Championship - the teams played out an unpleasant match won by Tipperary.

There is a lesson for Clare in the events of nine years ago. There are those in Galway who freely concede that the obsessive siege mentality of the camp in the lead-up to that semi-final ultimately cost them their All-Ireland. Had they concentrated on hurling and accepted that Keady was unavailable (replacement Sean Treacy went on to have a fine match at centre back), they would have surely been in better mental shape to overturn what finished as a three-point deficit.

The moral of this story is that bitterness is an unreliable motivator. Sometimes it works, more often it merely serves as a distraction. Handle with care.

The second point about Meath 1988 and Clare 1998 is that there is nothing particularly unusual about either the resentments stirred or the sight of teams cutting corners in order to succeed. After the Munster replay, Loughnane admitted that in the wind-up to the match, temperatures had soared into the red zone.

Similarly in a piece written for the Sunday Tribune after Meath's victory 10 years ago, Colm O'Rourke gave an appraisal of the team's strategy as they evolved after McEntee's sending-off. It made for a frank, if to many unpalatable, assessment. Essentially, Meath planned to do everything within their power to overcome the disadvantage. If that also happened to be within the rules, fine; if not, equally fine.

It's all very well to talk about sportsmanship, but the games continue to operate a reward system almost totally based on knock-out competitions where one defeat will render useless months of preparation.

In these circumstances, the restraining ethos of sportsmanship will frequently prove inadequate to the task of controlling outlaw instincts. In such cases, it's important that the discipline is imposed from outside. That means refereeing on the pitch and disciplinary structures off it.

There's no need to go into the same issues of refereeing performance and bizarre suspension systems, but as a very general criticism, there is a lack of clarity or inevitability in the punishments handed down. That Colin Lynch should be making an appearance before the Munster Council nearly three weeks after the relevant match is daft and unfair to both the player concerned and the authorities who have to weather the pressure that always builds in such cases.

But the rules stipulate that a referee's report has to be filed within seven days. In the days when a referee had to retain a mason to chip it out on tablets of stone, such a time scale may have made sense but nowadays it's a nonsense.

A player should know within days what suspension he's facing and if he then wants to appeal, so be it, but in the majority of cases the matter should be cut and dried. Match suspensions and red, yellow and purple cards may all be redolent of alien codes, but sometimes the aliens have it right.

France's Laurent Blanc knew immediately that he was going to miss a World Cup final when he was sent off in controversial circumstances in the semi-final. Imagine what we'd all have to endure if a county which had never reached an All-Ireland final got there with one of their best players up for suspension because of a contrived and harsh sending-off.