Seán Moran Gaelic Games

Beat that for a weekend: best weather of the year, big attendances and a genuine sense of possibility dawning for some traditionally downtrodden counties. But every silver lining has a cloud and the GAA has lost three of its most fervently supported teams from this year's championship.

It shouldn't have to be like this. The competitive structure shouldn't leave some of its best customers starved of top product a few days into June.

Of course Dublin, Kildare and Tipperary will remain alive - living and partly living - in the qualifier series but that takes a while to go box office, as this weekend's European Super League meeting between Dublin and London will confirm.

Making the necessary accommodations to enhance the games' promotional value has never been the GAA's strongest suit and we now face into a summer where such shortcomings will be all too obvious, as the following audit will indicate.

In the assets column there is the undoubted promotional value of unfashionable counties suddenly doing well. That's maybe too dramatic a description of the Waterford hurlers' season to date, as they were provincial champions two years ago but their win over Tipperary was, nonetheless, hugely important to them and the world at large.

To win Munster they have to beat Clare, Tipp and Cork. That's a huge toll of big, stressful matches and testimony to hurling's cock-eyed protocols when you bear in mind that such an odyssey will leave them at precisely the same stage as Kilkenny who have hardly known a stressful moment in Leinster for six years.

Given Waterford's - let's say - erratic tendencies it would be unwise to project them too strongly into an August All-Ireland semi-final before they have the provincial final played. It's a sobering thought that Waterford represent the hurling season's most likely source of novelty.

Wexford might surprise everyone, as they occasionally do, this weekend against Kilkenny but it's impossible to see them as All-Ireland contenders until they acquire the ability to play well as a matter of course rather than in one or two randomly chosen big days out.

Hurling has had its great age of democracy. There isn't a county left with the remotest (as in closer than Pluto) chance of winning a provincial title that hasn't already done so within the past 10 years.

Football is a different matter. Its breakthroughs have been genuine and frequent with new counties experiencing unprecedented levels of success. Westmeath's season has already been a triumph with preciously rare wins over Offaly and Dublin a tribute to their underage emergence in the 1990s. It is also a tribute to Páidi Ó Sé's serendipity.

For most people (and here's no exception) he went to Westmeath in less than ideal circumstances and there'd have been short odds-on the whole venture ending in tears. Yet after a most unpromising spring he has recovered and evidently managed to impart the self-belief that had been the one ingredient missing from the county's efforts in recent years.

In a way the least lauded achievement of the weekend was the most remarkable. Wexford have virtually no underage football silverware (Good Counsel won the 1999 All-Ireland Colleges' title) to rattle when the going gets tough and such as they have tends to end up in the dressing-rooms of the senior hurling team.

You can point to the team's National League achievement to rationalise the result but that sort of credential has rarely opened many doors in the past.

Times change and it is evidence, however, that the league's status continues to rise. After Tyrone's pioneering work in the area last year, we have now seen two of the leading Leinster counties, Offaly and Kildare, who spent the season in Division Two coming up short against less recognised counties who have managed to survive and prosper in the top flight.

Wexford football has no tradition of high living that's not almost a century old. For them to take down an establishment outfit like Kildare was a significant triumph of the will for a side that only two years ago choked on Carlow with league promotion seemingly certain.

These sort of results are doubly important. Success passing around provides variety for the public and reinforces self-belief - an urgent necessity in a format that guarantees teams only two outings a year.

Secondly it inspires other counties in similar situations to believe that if they do the work and apply themselves, there is no reason why they can't emulate such breakthroughs.

The assets of the current situation are tangible but there are also liabilities. Leinster football is going through something of a big bang at present. Assuming Laois beat Meath (and even typing that clause feels somehow improper), the province will have its first final in 36 years without one of the big four (Dublin, Meath, Offaly and Kildare, who between them had until last year won each of the 34 intervening Leinster titles) and only the third in the last 50 years.

This egalitarian age does, however, appear to have come at the expense of competitiveness at the highest level. For the second season running Leinster is the one province, by common consent, not to have plausible All-Ireland contenders. Laois may have their advocates but they're not in the front rank of likely candidates.

Then there is the hole in the province's revenue. Leinster now have a semi-final that will draw about half the crowd that might have been expected had it turned out Dublin-Kildare with a knock-on effect likely for the final. Provincial secretary Michael Delaney has always maintained that they budget on average figures with replays and other bonanzas coming in as bonuses. But this summer is shaping up well below average.

There's a danger here of elevating certain counties above others on the basis of demographics and drawing power - a danger that is already perceived in smaller counties, albeit mostly among conspiracy theorists and paranoiacs.

Whereas no one's suggesting preferential treatment for big counties, the largely knockout championship system continues to squander the big audience base in establishment counties. That's a promotional and financial loss. A separate issue perhaps but one for which the heroics of Westmeath and Wexford can't be expected to compensate.

smoran@irish-times.ie.