When Tipperary lost to Clare in the Munster final some weeks ago their dressing-room reflected the sort of comprehensive devastation associated with graver, more terminal calamities.

The drained faces showed no gratitude at the prospect of the back door reprieve which hurling's new format had granted them.

Tipperary manager Len Gaynor sat staring at the floor. Around him Tipperary players spoke in whispers and shed quiet tears.

Tonight in Clones they get their shot at reprieve, the first defeated championship side in modern times to slip back into the big race. Their hearts and their heads haven't fully accommodated it yet. Dead men hurling.

"That dressing-room was worse I'd say than after any game I've played in since I started," says Tipperary's Michael Cleary. "I don't think anyone there cared about second chances."

The lack of second chances is the basis on which the romance of GAA championships has been built.

This year for the first time the losing finalists in the Munster and Leinster hurling finals don't fade away into the small print of history, licking their wounds and patching their pride till they get a crack at their conquerors again. This year the losers schedule training sessions for the following week and set about putting the show back on the road again in a knockout competition which doesn't always knock you out.

The system has produced mixed feelings and created new challenges for mentors left with the task of picking their hurlers up off the floor.

Gaynor hasn't been an advocate of the new system. Bringing his team back in through the back door isn't a managerial task he has performed with relish or enthusiasm.

"I've said all along that I don't like the idea of losing teams getting back into the championship and I'd stick by that. We have more games though and we just have to get on with it, we have to go out to win."

Kilkenny's defeat to Wexford didn't seem so catastrophic as Tipperary's fate and in many ways it wasn't.

The aftermath was grim but reflected the fact that Kilkenny took several positives out of their provincial defeat and viewed many of the negatives as being explainable through injury or freakishly bad form.

As luck would have it, Kilkenny are managed by Nicky Brennan, one of the more public faces of the drive to sell the new format.

Brennan, a member of the committee which devised the new scheme, is pleased to note that the system appears to be winning converts.

"I know that many players don't take my view on this new system. I'd know that from things they've said to me over the last year. They aren't convinced. I say to them `look here it is, this is how it is for the next two years. You have a second chance which lots of Kilkenny teams before ye never had.

Get on with it If ye win the All-Ireland you can worry about what people will say then'. Now that the match is drawing near I think they are beginning to relish it."

Having shed their tears, both Tipperary and Kilkenny were offered preliminary rehabilitation in the form of National League quarter-final games the following Saturday.

Both teams restricted themselves to a single desultory training session in the week after their provincial traumas, just a chance to blow the cobwebs away, take the fresh air and swap whatever harsh words needed swapping.

Both won through their league quarterfinals but witness accounts suggest that Kilkenny learned more from their breezy destruction of Cork than Tipperary learned from their three quarter-paced game against Dublin in the Thurles gloom.

Either way both sides are busy effecting running repairs as the championship gains momentum and neither team looks this weekend much like the team which played in the provincial final.

The new format of the championship creates new territory for those teams beaten on big Sundays and attempting to repair the bubble in time for this weekend. There is the difficulty of recovering mentally but there is the opportunity, having had weaknesses exposed, to make things right and fight again. Championship defeats usually mark the end to the year. Now they herald a return to the drawing board.

The new calendar brings some novel fixtures too. Tipperary and Down? Clones on a Saturday afternoon in July? An All-Ireland quarter-final? Who could have dreamt that hurling's brave new world would seem so strange. Have they seen hurleys in Clones? Somewhere there are Gaels spinning in their graves.

Micheal Cleary, who became the latest victim of serial filleter Brian Lohan in the Munster final, isn't entirely sure yet of the merits of the system. He travels to Clones from the team's base in Cavan tonight wondering if this addendum to their season will be at all fulfilling.

"We went back to Foxes in Cashel on the night of the Munster final and to a man I'd say all the team was there and to a man the attitude would have been 'feck it, we deserve to be gone out of it'. You get beaten and you're out.

"From a player's point of view the new format came into its own when we came together again on the Wednesday night for training. Usually you lose a championship game and it could be four or six weeks before the knot is gone out of your stomach over it.

It's the end of training and the end of the crack and the lads and maybe no county hurling till October. But we came back together and slowly you hope to get the feeling back. When the draw came out we knew we had a chance to make it back to Croke Park."

D J Carey was another provincial final victim. He too was originally unenthusiastic about the new format. Circumstance has made a convert of him. After a poor Leinster final performance when Rod Guiney's breath was seldom off the back of his neck, Carey has the chance to rebuild his season.

"Losing the Wexford game was as disappointing as losing any Leinster final," he says. "When we shut the door into the dressing-room there wasn't anything said because there was nothing to say really.

We wanted to win it. We told ourselves beforehand that we wanted to get into the All-Ireland semi-finals the proper way. We lost. "We got together again on the Thursday though. Decided to leave it for a few days before we met up again. By Thursday we had got it out of our heads.

You'd be glad to be getting back to hurling then."

The league games which confronted each side on the Saturday night following their provincial defeats have been evaluated differently.

There will be grumblings in Down about disrespect and the ritual debasement of the peninsula's hurling currency but in many places Kilkenny drawing Galway is being viewed as a blessing in terms of immediately refocusing the team's vision. Kilkenny travelled to Cork knowing that they'd best get in shape quickly because the gradient was about to get steeper.

Brennan, the great evangelist of the new hurling format, is experiencing it all first hand and reckons that the newness and novelty of it all has helped a little with team preparation.

"We lost to Wexford and then straight away we had the draw for the quarter-finals, a training session on Thursday and then a league quarter-final on Saturday. Maybe we'll look back later and say that having three matches in three weeks like that was a bad thing but we've just had to get on with it. The lads were subdued in the dressing-room before the game against Cork but they got out there and realised they had a match on their hands and the bit of pride came back."

That need to refocus quickly appears to have given some added value to Kilkenny's visit to Cork.

"We went to Cork on the Saturday," says Carey. "That was useful. Cork didn't seem to have an awful lot of work done for it but we played fairly well down there. It was nice to have that game. It was a league quarter-final, so it was a small bit like championship.

"The difference is that sometimes if you lose a Leinster final and there was good things to be taken out of it, well sure it doesn't matter because your year is finished. For us now even though some of us, myself included, were disappointing in the Leinster final we have been able to take the good things out of it and get on with it. We have three games left if we want to win an All-Ireland.

We knew in Cork who we had to play and we just got on with it. Lots of fellas that played against Cork knew they were looking for their places in a big game against Galway."

For Tipperary the experience of the league quarter-final was vastly different. On a rainy night in Thurles their team was makeshift and shiftless. Strange things happened. John Enright failed to reproduce a timely splash of his colleges form but didn't get withdrawn until injury time. Cleary, still bruised from his afternoon with Brian Lohan, got a spell in at full forward, a position in which he freely concedes he doesn't expect to wear the county jersey again.

"We played Dublin and it was a dreary night and we were still feeling sorry for ourselves," says Cleary. "It was raining and the crowd wasn't great. There wasn't much to be learned that night."

Gaynor puts a slightly more positive spin on the Dublin game, pointing out that in the aftermath the players' mood was a little sparkier, which in itself was progress.

"We didn't play very well against Dublin and it was a hard game but we won comfortably and that's always a good thing. By the time we were leaving the ground after the Dublin game I think the players were beginning to look forward to the rest of the championship. Things were looking up."

In terms of the nuts and bolts of hurling the new system has already been empirically tested.

Gaynor and Brennan have faced the problem of sitting down beside teams given the kiss of life and telling them to jump straight back into the pool. In public relations terms the mountain still has to be climbed. Kilkenny and Tipperary report good interest in this weekend's fixtures among their traditional worshippers.

Cleary, who has never set foot in Clones, would be typical of many hurling followers - curiosity is getting the better of them.

If both counties get through this weekend, however, and set up the possibility of two losing provincial finalists meeting in the All-Ireland final the brave new world of hurling may look a little less glossy.

"Players might be worried about that all right," says Brennan. "But I'd say to them that it would be better to be playing in that All-Ireland final than to be sitting at home in your house watching somebody else play in it.

"People will say this and that about it, that we got the chance to learn from our mistakes or whatever but the system is there, with respect you have to go out and use it.

Don't forget we stayed with Wexford for more than 60 minutes and if John Leahy had connected with one pull of the ball Tipperary would have drawn with Clare. People might be critical but there is very little between the sides left in the competition. Whoever comes through will have won three games in a row."

The difficulty in marketing terms might not be so much the fact that losing teams have been allowed regain their footing so much as the identity of the losing teams. After two years of novel and universally loved hurling champions a Tipperary-Kilkenny All-Ireland final would have a little too much of the ancien regime about it.

The two-year experiment might be in trouble then. For the participants there is nothing to be done except keep plugging.

"We have another crack and as yet it's not the same," says Carey. "We wanted to be Leinster champions, but if we get a win under our belts and go all the way I don't think anyone could take away from that sort of an All-Ireland win."

"I suppose for us when we saw the draw and thought about it all we thought it was a chance to go back to Croke Park," says Cleary. "The team is still a bit unsettled, I think you'd see that in the selection and maybe if we get through this game we'll feel better about it."

"I don't know how hurling people would take it," says Gaynor. "But for us when we talked about the year we said that the Clare game wasn't the way we wanted to sign off. We made up our minds that we couldn't go out on that note. We wanted to play to our potential. That's the way we are looking at it now."