ON GAELIC GAMES:Dublin's disintegration last Saturday at the hands of Kilkenny is another blow for those counties who aspire to join the traditional 'Big Three' at the top

IT’S ABOUT as thick a glass ceiling as can be found anywhere in sport. Hurling is a game of such precision and steep technical demands that comparatively small differentials can end in a thrashing. And that’s just the physical dimension – what the teams and individual players actually do on the field.

What they think is probably even more important. Harbouring any doubts as to your ability to win or even compete isn’t going to help in the execution of intricate skills and the application of a requisite standard of game play – reading the contest and making correct decisions in the thick of the action.

What governs that psychological condition is as important. It extends to tradition and the painful awareness of so many counties that they have no place at hurling’s top table and can’t even realistically hope to for the distantly foreseeable – at least – future.

At 14, Chris Coulter won the national Féile skills competition. Being from Armagh he would have known that for all his technical prowess, a commensurate career at the top of the game was out of the question. That’s the way the GAA is organised, football and hurling. Where you’re from is a more powerful determinant than how good you are.

Hurling is, however, a more extreme example, as its caste operates at so many levels. There are very few counties who wouldn’t be capable of registering a senior football championship win over somebody.

The bottom team in the NFL is Kilkenny. London and Carlow are the counties immediately above them and both won matches last summer and only this month Carlow held the 2010 Leinster champions to a draw.

Were their hurling counterparts Fermanagh to play the Leinster champions of two years ago – and in 125 championships they have never had to face Kilkenny – the scale of the devastation would ensure that no wildflowers would grow at the venue for decades afterwards nor would any birdsong be heard.

In the hurling championship there are now four different tiers and within those you could cordon off even a few more sections.

Dublin went into last Saturday’s Leinster semi-final buoyed by a sense that circumstances were more propitious this year than 12 months ago. The injury pendulum had swung and most of Dublin’s players were back whereas Kilkenny were down a couple of significant names.

The venue wasn’t Croke Park where Dublin had underperformed so abysmally against the champions in the previous two years and it was Kilkenny’s first match.

Such is the yearning amongst the hurling public in general for some signs of competition that the context of the match became one of looking for good reasons why Dublin would be a handful and how they could rattle their opponents.

Did the team enter into the spirit of this too enthusiastically and increase the pressure on themselves? It’s hard to find fault there. There was nothing bumptious or disrespectful about any of the utterances in the lead-up to the match.

Had there been an overemphasis on the traditional, exaggerated diffidence of GAA teams there would have been criticism that they were selling themselves short. Making noises about nothing more ambitious than being competitive was hardly riding for a fall.

Yet they clearly didn’t believe. The collapse was too precipitous and the self-confidence and by extension, resilience too brittle in the face of early setbacks.

It would be interesting to know what was in the players’ minds.

Within the last few years, a county team that endured a similar experience to that of Dublin’s hurlers at the weekend – expected to do well and badly beaten – was debriefed and it emerged that roughly half of the team acknowledged they hadn’t expected to win.

Conversely, a team of Kilkenny’s experience and proven imperviousness to pressure was placed in a position where the focus of expectation was deflected more than a little by the anticipated challenge from opponents, who had suffered over the years a desperately poor record against them.

Senior championship is uniquely testing. Not for nothing did the late Séamus Brennan of Fianna Fáil tell his Green Party counterparts as they negotiated a programme for their ill-fated government in 2007: “You’re playing senior hurling now.”

Cork manager Jimmy Barry-Murphy reflected after this year’s league final and a heavy defeat by Kilkenny there was a difference even between divisional matches and a final. There’s also an ascending difference between a league final and championship of any sort.

Part of the confidence in Dublin’s ability to make an impression four days ago was based on league displays, most implicitly the 2011 final when an out-of-sorts and for most of the match, 14-man Kilkenny (four of their players that day have subsequently retired and all told, half of the team had changed by last weekend) were well beaten.

The last time Kilkenny got hold of a team in championship that had beaten them in the previous year’s league final, they were similarly remorseless and beat Waterford by 23 points in the 2008 All-Ireland final.

Interestingly, teams they have beaten in the previous year’s league final come out of it far better, as Cork, Limerick and Clare all lost with dignity intact in 2003, ’06 and ’07.

Dublin manager Anthony Daly has a great record of reconstituting fortunes in the qualifiers and will need all of that power to inspire when he takes the team to his home place the week after next because Dublin look damaged even if the big-day disintegration has been confined to matches against Kilkenny.

The championship itself is damaged because everyone wants a more competitive environment and yet counties are finding it impossible to emulate Kilkenny’s high standards. But for the perfect storm of Tipperary’s freewheeling tactics and Kilkenny’s injuries in 2010, would we be looking at a seven-in-a-row this September?

Dublin are also emblematic of the possibilities of social mobility in hurling – an encouragement that if a county expends effort and resources in developing the game and pushing hard for senior progress – so for the team to crumble to the sort of defeat that was commonplace before the hoped-for revolution questions counties’ ability ever to break out of tradition’s straitjacket.

But that’s the way it always has been. The big three of Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary have dominated the game since its inception and more than ever in the past 14 seasons. That’s why Golden Ages (1950s, ’90s and to an extent the ’80s) are deemed to have occurred when other counties can mount a sustained and meaningful challenge.

By the looks of things we’ll be waiting a while for the next one. smoran@irishtimes.com