Sunday last in Croke Park represents a good point at which to pass a few preliminary judgments on the hurling year. The All-Ireland line-up is now complete and certain trends have been well-established. Although the past week has left a sour residue in the wake of Clare's and Waterford's unhappy Munster finals, the indicators for the game are on one level good.

Attendances continue to rise. The figure for last year was over 200 per cent up on that for 1994 and the increase has been organic and largely sustainable. Already this year can be projected as registering a further increase: the total for Munster including the final replay - for all the affronted Gaels it left in its wake - will probably offset a disappointing Leinster campaign which lost out through the absence of Wexford from the provincial final.

The All-Ireland totals will also suffer from Wexford's absence, as Offaly is a smaller county without the same numbers of fanatical supporters and consequently won't attract the same sort of crowd for the semi-final as Clare and Wexford - or indeed Clare and Kilkenny (around 46,000 last year) - would have done.

Aside from attendances the other indicator of good health is a reasonable turnover of contenders for titles.

This year, the emergence of Waterford has already made a contribution and may ultimately be classified as significant a resurgence as that of Clare and Wexford.

Nonetheless there have been negatives to the season even to date and the weekend's quarterfinals embodied a few. For a start, the attendance was a meagre 26,000 (which could have been worse but for the enthusiasm of Waterford's indefatigable support). Yet this is becoming a trend. Last year in Thurles, Galway and Kilkenny managed to attract only a similar figure.

More depressing than the lack of atmosphere was the grim state of three of the quarter-finalists. For the second year of the championship experiment, Ulster and Connacht will be unrepresented at the semi-finals.

The state of Antrim and other Northern counties has been chewed over on frequent occasions but with the exception of 1989 and 1991, the strength of the Northern challenge has been minimal. The arrival of Derry as a force in the province this year is to be welcomed but doesn't improve the overall level of hurling in Ulster.

Isolation, both in terms of hurling's geography and in the face of loyalist harassment, takes its toll on the championship effort and in the light of Sunday's evidence, a solution is no nearer to hand than it was when the Hurling Development Committee began its deliberations.

Galway had a considerably further distance to fall than Antrim but they are making a good fist of catching up. It is now over 10 years since their last All-Ireland and despite an interim in which no county has won more under-age All-Irelands (and only Kilkenny has equalled their total of five), the county has only once seriously challenged for the championship.

The system which leaves the county staggering from year to year losing their first and only significant championship match is not new but is particularly debilitating at a time when no one seems sure of what the best team is and the perennial drain on confidence is becoming cumulative.

Offaly are now in terrible decline. This year was always going to be the last-chance (ummm) saloon for the team and the failure of Babs Keating and the players to cohere looks certain to have scuppered that last chance. With nothing coming through at under-age, the county is set for a lengthy spell in the doldrums.

It's a problem afflicting Leinster in general (Kilkenny have won the last nine minor championships) and if Wexford are unable to retain their recently discovered momentum at senior level (and also at under-21 and under-14), the province will have tumbled from providing three different All-Ireland champions in mid-decade to the verge of uncompetitiveness.

Admittedly there was similar keening at the start of the 1990s before Kilkenny arrived and won two All-Irelands but looking at the contrast between Offaly and their Munster counterparts Waterford last weekend, it was hard to avoid gloomy feelings about Leinster's future.

The supremacy of Munster which may result in another southern-monopolised All-Ireland final occurs at a time when the experimental championship format known (to the despair of its originators) as the "back door" comes to the end of its two-year trial.

Its fate is to be decided at a special congress in Wexford this autumn. Whereas it has been an unarguable success on a number of fronts and a considerable advance on the previous system, there is evidence that it doesn't go far enough to address the sort of problems currently being faced by senior hurling teams in Connacht and Ulster.

But given the innate conservatism of a GAA congress, retention of the current format may be the best option feasible. If there is to be no open draw or national format which would allow teams a guarantee of more than one championship match, the past two years deserve approval.

By creating the quarter-final level, the GAA has greatly helped the quality of the All-Ireland semi-finals. This year's penultimate stage could have been Galway-Clare and Kilkenny-Antrim - a double bill that would have produced a one-sided fiasco.

Instead, one potentially great semi-final (Kilkenny-Waterford) and another possibly tolerable (although probably unsatisfactory) one (Offaly-Clare).

Secondly, the re-admission of beaten Munster and Leinster finalists has worked to the advantage of the championship in general. There were shudders last year when Tipperary and Kilkenny got the second chance as it was always going to be a nightmare for the framers of the experiment were a traditional power to win an All-Ireland after coming second in their province.

In the event, Tipperary used the opportunity to end the season as the second-best team in the country after providing a memorable All-Ireland final. Reservations about the format in Ulster and Connacht haven't been well served by the provinces' chronic inability to meet the challenge of the beaten teams they have played.

This time around, Waterford have emphasised the purpose envisaged by the championship reforms: that an emerging county team should be given every chance to develop even if the provincial final - which will generally favour the established power - proves too daunting a task.

The team has now regrouped, won its quarter-final in difficult circumstances and will face neighbours Kilkenny in an evocative semi-final next month.

And any suggestion that the competitiveness of provincial finals would suffer because of the second chance could be seen as baseless even as the gunsmoke cleared in Thurles after the Munster replay.