Tom Humphries talks to Conal Keaney ahead of tomorrow's Leinster Under-21 football final about the pressures that go with being a dual star

Exam time. Blossoms on the cherry trees and a golden stretch in the evenings. The ground is caked hard so you can hear your own footfalls when you run out onto a training pitch. That sound is the rhythm of Conal Keaney's life these days. If it's daylight he should be training with some team, some where.

Anyway, exam time. The books make their siren call too. He surveys the mound of engineering texts he has to digest. Two weeks to devour them all and know them all. Exam time. Time to find a library seat and weld his backside to it. Still. He has a Leinster Under-21 football final tomorrow. The Leinster senior hurling championship in a couple of weeks. All sorts of cogs are starting to turn.

Scratch some figures on a notepad. Here's a calculation which Conal Keaney hasn't made yet this year. The number of teams he's served on. Hurling and football in college in Tallaght. Under-21s and seniors in Ballyboden in both football and hurling. Under-21 for the county in both codes. Senior hurling for the Dubs. He's afraid if he adds it all up it will turn out that he's been playing for more hours than there are in a day.

He's not alone with that fear. Those who watch him and believe him to be the Messiah that Dublin hurling has been waiting on fret that he will be burned out as fecklessly as was his clubmate Collie Moran. Once Moran carried the same expectation in football as Keaney now does in hurling. This summer football people just hope that the old Collie Moran will come back.

The pressure of being Dublin's most gifted dual player since Des Foley seems to wash over Keaney, though. He appears almost oblivious to the constant fear among the hurling community that the senior footballers are going to abduct him and take him away to a life of sun-splashed glamour. Right now the biggest problem he has is keeping track of where he's supposed to be all the time. If he's tired, he just announces that he is tired and mentors seem to understand.

He's young and loving it. The biggest problem is that people keep asking. What are you going to choose? When are you going to choose? He's just glad to be playing.

And what will he choose? The pull of football is easy to see. The footballers are the Blues. Hurling brings the blues. He won a Walsh Cup medal this year. That's one intercounty medal more than most Dublin hurlers win in their career.

He already has reason to reflect that if it wasn't for bad luck Dublin's young hurlers would have no luck at all. A couple of years ago the Combined Dublin Colleges side, of which Keaney was the linchpin, beat St Kieran's on their way to a Leinster title. They then conceded two goals in the last two minutes to lose the All-Ireland semi-final.

Last summer the Dublin Under-21 hurlers led by three points going into injury-time in the Leinster final against Wexford. They even had a chance to add an insurance point. Instead they got their pockets picked.

So football is Broadway and hurling is a touring rep company. Dublin football is Croke Park and full houses and that roar. Dublin hurling is about two seasons every year, pre-season and next season. In between there's the worry about getting tickets to see the footballers. And yet, he has more talent than any Dublin hurler in recent memory and as much ability as any player to emerge anywhere this decade. If a player is capable of making a difference it is Keaney. If a player can stem the tide it is he.

He is capable not just of minding his own game and winning his own battle but of swinging a game, taking it by the scruff of the neck and making it his own. Immersed in a game he can suddenly start winning everything in the middle third of the field and converting it into scores or chances. With a generation of good Dublin hurlers emerging behind him the prayers of the faithful are offered up that he will stick around and lead the way to the promised land.

Subtract him from that equation and the future of Dublin hurling looks less bright. In that regard the pressure on him is unusual and unfair. It is an aggregate of other pressures. You could list half a dozen of the current Dublin football panel who would be better served playing hurling but if Keaney, who is better than any of them, were to make the same choice it would have the feel of the straw which broke the camel's back.

This weekend, though, it's football that claims him. A Leinster Under-21 final. His football prowess has already been well noted by the powers that be. Four extraordinary points from play against Tyrone in last year's All-Ireland Under-21 semi-final, a series of match winning performances to bring Tallaght IT to a Trench Cup earlier this year. There is little doubt that he's got game.

When the time comes he'll make his choice. Till then he's saying nothing and neither the footballers or the hurlers seem willing to tug his arms till his shoulders pop. He was rested by the Dublin hurlers last weekend, a gesture of understanding which should lead to an asterisk being added to the statistic of Dublin's win against Offaly. *Won. Without Conal Keaney.

His voice betrays a little weariness about the question of choice.

"I don't know. Obviously people always ask. It's hard to say. I love playing both. Whichever I'm playing well at the time is what I prefer. I can love one and hate the other. At the moment there's not too much pressure but since Christmas there's been something big every weekend. Keeping track of different places for different training is the hard part. I suppose it's better than not doing anything."

He's used to making choices though. Unusually for a GAA star, he was educated at Terenure College where he played rugby to Junior Cup level. As his schoolmates took their Senior Cup vows Keaney dropped out. "When it came to the Senior Cup they were training every night of the week, I was playing Dublin colleges and with the club (Ballyboden St Enda's). They said I had to make a choice. Once they realised I was playing a decent level they accepted that I was out of the rugby. In fairness, they keep a good eye on how I'm getting on, I get a phone call off the principal and stuff to see how I'm going on, which is nice. I think I was the only one in the school at the time who was playing hurling." That period playing for a Combined Dublin Colleges team under the enlightened management of Colm Ó Seallaigh was critical in his development, he reckons.

"Personally, it was the best experience I've had in hurling. I learned an unbelievable amount. For every youngster in Dublin who plays hurling getting onto that team should be the aim. Playing against guys like Eoin Kelly is what raises your game. We came up against players like that most weeks. Your level rises. You play intercounty hurling during the week every week rather than a once off in the summer. Good intense matches. If we didn't have league or championship we had a useful challenge game."

The confidence bred into that bunch has survived into the Dublin senior panel. It didn't make much of a ripple in anyone's pond but winning the Walsh Cup this year meant a lot to Dublin hurling. A step in the right direction.

"I know Walsh Cup wouldn't be huge in some places but beating Kilkenny in the final was important. They're not invincible. For a few weeks after we won it we had this idea we were as good as anyone else. Then we had a few results in the league against Galway and the like and it was back to hard work, looking at the championship."

Tomorrow it's the Under-21 grade against Longford. Dublin have unfinished business in both codes this year. The footballers rolled over and died in the All-Ireland final against Galway last year. The hurlers suffered worse heartbreak in that Leinster final.

"That was a huge blow, just a huge blow. I remember being on the pitch thinking there's only a minute or two left, we're going to get the Cup and it will be the first time in such a long time and what will it mean. They got a goal and went on and won the game but we learned a lot from the experience. The lads are back training now and we'll give it all this year."

Tomorrow it begins again in earnest. Throats have been cleared. Time for the songs of summer.