Tom Humphries looks at Leinster football as it starts out on another journey with dreams of September glory

SO THE Leinster football championship gets coaxed into life tomorrow. Less like a forest fire raging through our imaginations, more like a sturdy old Superser throwing out a little heat but nothing of beauty, no antic flames leaping through the summer.

Last week’s opening act, Wicklow hosing Carlow, was disappointing, even when measured against our paltry expectations for it, but neither side had the sort of tradition which allows the Leinster championship to fan itself into something eye-catching every summer.

Meath and Offaly, each earnest outfits in their own way, have that tradition, and even though they won’t be bothering the bookmakers with news of their form when September comes, the memory of times past is sufficient to draw us to them, rubbing our hands in anticipation.

So it goes. To enjoy Leinster football you have to be willing to view it as an entertainment in itself. Musical theatre as opposed to grand opera. Panto as opposed to theatre.

Suspend your belief in a bigger and better world beyond the borders of the province. Everything you know and everything you are sentimental about takes places on this little stage.

Midlands derbies. The Dubs and Meath. Yellowbellies rising. Mick O’Dwyer rambling from county to county like a snake oil salesman who actually makes you feel better. Enjoy it all for what it is. It has no larger relevance.

Shockingly, 2001 is the last time Leinster sent a representative to the All-Ireland final. Galway folded Meath up like an old flag and left them into the shed to grow musty along with 11 other standards of the same provenance.

Eight summers have passed. Nobody is betting seriously against a ninth September slipping by before somebody blows the dust off a tatterdemalioned set of colours and unfolds them into the sunshine.

What keeps us happy is the hype and the hope. Two wins in a row for the Dubs is a mass movement of hope greater and more persuasive that anything MLK dreamed of. Every summer, the Dubs emerge from their larval league state to fly briefly like holly blue butterflies before being shredded in the propellers of a bigger team. It’s a death of epic beauty every time.

And the importation of expertise never ceases to impress us. Wexford, Wicklow, Westmeath, Laois, Louth, Kildare have all had flights of fancy fuelled by outsiders who asked why not. Generally those men got their answer in the qualifiers or the quarter-finals and kept moving, but their attractions are still potent.

Will it be different this summer? The ante post scenario suggests not. Offaly are on a roll of awfulness, shredding the spirits and reputation of managers along the way. The Faithful’s five-year record is depressing. In 2005, asked to leave Leinster by Laois, they lost to a Carlow side in the qualifiers, a Carlow side who were then mauled by Limerick. Food chain: low end. News: small print. A year later their number bubbled up to the top in the lottery machine and they got to a Leinster final.

Beaten by the Dubs but hope remained rampant until Laois gave them the midland smackdown in the qualifiers a fortnight later.

So it went. That trip to the Leinster final cemented their reputation as “promising”. In 2007 they confirmed they had now mastered Carlow (their last win) but the Dubs had five points on them the next day out.

The year 2008 brought straight and convincing losses to Westmeath and then to Down. Last year was equally straightforward. Kildare ushered Offaly out of Leinster. Wexford provided the lethal injection in the qualifiers.

Ah. And yet and yet . . . because Offaly are Offaly whom we believe to be a football county, their clash with Meath has a resonance which requires the use of adjectival phrases like hard fought, teak tough, and no quarter given, much less asked.

Meath, given how far they have managed to wander in recent championships, should really be shorter odds to beat Offaly than they are. The county keeps producing forwards of quality, so much so they have a surplus for which they would willingly barter if some top notch defenders were available elsewhere.

Still just as Offaly are forever Offaly, Meath retain those dour but impressive qualities of Meathness which makes them hard to shift when they get going. If they get a few games under their belt one imagines that the end, if and when it comes, will be as it was against Kerry last year, outclassed by a statistically modest amount, rather than the conflagrations which Dublin have been throwing up in recent years.

The ongoing recession in the province is inexplicable, but it is self-perpetuating.

What makes Meath and Offaly a slightly interesting prospect is the fact you don’t have to be very old to recall either province stitching together three Leinster titles back to back and using that as a platform for national dominance.

That sits alarmingly with the reality of Dublin being the favourites for a sixth provincial title in a row this summer and the shrug of indifference which the notion prompts.

Back in 2002, when Dublin broke a cycle of provincial failure which had marked them since the 1995 All-Ireland win, it felt as though that Leinster final would propel them back into the big time. Creating a subsequent sequence of five Leinster titles without a single visit to the All-Ireland final was not what anybody had in mind. A life of eternal, unconsummated foreplay.

Leinster is still stagnant. Since the inception of the qualifiers in 2001 Leinster sides have played knock-out ties against teams from outside the province on 105 occasions. They have won 53 and lost 52 of those games, which, on the face of it, seems a decent record in minnow a minnow combat.

Later in the summer the statistics get more alarming, however. The province punches well beneath its weight in sending teams to the All-Ireland quarter-finals through the qualifier series. Since the quarter-finals came into being nine seasons ago, 36 places have been claimed by sides coming through the qualifiers (the other 36 coming from winners of provincial championships). Leinster has claimed just 11 of those places. From the third qualifying round and beyond, Leinster sides struggle seriously.

Beyond the quarter-finals the story gets worse. One semi-final win in all that time. A number of years when Leinster had no semi-final representatives at all. The odd stat that during Dublin’s Leinster reign their only trip to the semi-finals has come in 2006 when they drew Westmeath in the quarter final series.

Wexford have just as many semi-final appearances and their 2008 quarter-final defeat of Armagh was arguably the high point of the province’s achievement in recent times.

Meath have been to the second last hurdle twice, beating Tyrone and Mayo in their quarter-finals.

Meath and Offaly set off tomorrow night unsure after odd league campaigns of what they have at their disposal, what they have a right to hope for. The evidence is they are products of the mediocre environment they play their football in at the moment.

All this time and Leinster still awaits a tide which might lift all boats. Meanwhile, the battle is who can be kings of the sandcastle.