THEY NEVER come back. The old boxing saw proved its timeless quality in Galway on Monday night. Then again those among the 28 who voted to terminate Ger Loughnane's tenure as the county's hurling manager would point out that the truth of it had been proved over the past two years, writes Ger Loughnane

It would have been scarcely conceivable back in September 2006 when Loughnane was appointed to the Galway job in an atmosphere of revivalist zeal that the outcome would have been so depressingly divisive and sour.

At the time it appeared a great fit: a county with no shortage of successful under-age hurlers, who seemed to be short only an experienced hand in the winning of All-Irelands and a forceful personality to impose his vision on the teeming talent.

If it was clear Galway had something to gain from this, what was Loughnane's interest? After all he had indelibly marked the game by taking his county to two All-Irelands and three Munster titles, prizes that had been inaccessible to Clare for seven decades.

Some who spoke to him around the time just before his appointment felt he was anxious to go back into the field and have a crack at a Kilkenny team then rising to its current pre-eminence under the direction of his old college contemporary Brian Cody.

Even within Kilkenny there was a perception that Loughnane was developing an almost obsessive desire to lock horns with Cody and that Galway was providing that opportunity.

If that was the ambition it was put to the test only once when in an absorbing All-Ireland quarter-final last year Galway stayed neck-and-neck for an hour before getting put away ruthlessly in the final 10 minutes.

Those preceding 60 minutes were to be as close as any team got to Kilkenny in the past two championships.

That performance, though, only had value as a platform, something that would be a springboard to improvement and success in 2008. When that so signally failed to happen this year the knives were always going to come out and in the sombre words of Jim Carney on RTÉ radio's Drive Time Sport on Monday evening: "There's blood on the floor in Galway again, I'm afraid".

He wasn't even speaking after the meeting had voted 28-26 to dump Loughnane but beforehand and on the basis that the knives had been flashing already and even if the county hurling manager was to survive he would have been fairly bloodied in the process.

The hostilities within the county hurling board have proven so divisive Loughnane's fate has been almost a sideshow. The amount of squabbling over the vote that narrowly brought the county into the Leinster hurling championship (although Croke Park sources believe the proposal would have been carried against Galway's wishes anyway at the special congress of two weeks ago) was striking.

It took the intervention of a players' statement pleading with the board to back the move before the Hurling Development Committee blueprint got the go-ahead.

This week the players weren't anxious to strike positions on the issue of management and that's understandable. There were issues with Loughnane's back-room team of Louis Mulqueen and Seán Treacy but few wanted to push a collective line.

Taking such a forceful stand on the Leinster question hadn't attracted universal support. At present, less than a year after the latest rumble in Cork between players and officials and months after Waterford's hurlers abruptly called time on Justin McCarthy and a matter of only days since John Meyler suffered the same fate in Wexford, there is a view that "player power" has got out of hand within the GAA.

Some players also felt that in the absence of a training panel none of them had formal status to broadcast a representative policy on the team management.

Other reasons also apply. The 20 years of failure within the county has left Galway hurling short of the type of iconic, successful figures that populated the great team of the 1980s. After another year of coming up short, there simply isn't a supply of distinguished, successful hurlers who could command widespread respect for their views on team management.

For David Collins to take the stand he did in relation to the Hurling Development Committee (HDC) proposals was brave but in any other county and but for the guerrilla politics of Galway hurling, the whole matter would have been one of housekeeping.

Apportioning blame in a discussion on the management's future would have been neither as easy nor as accepted an intervention. The two Galway hurlers with perhaps the stature to speak about this year, the Cannings - Ollie and Joe - had the complicated background of only having re-joined (and joined) the county panel this season.

So the players were well advised to record publicly that they had not taken a position on the matter, even if in retrospect that appears to have damned Loughnane with cool impartiality.

But the reason this coup happened was because the Clareman, far from vanquishing Cody in titanic struggles, couldn't beat anyone in the championship apart from Laois and Antrim. Disappointment and under-performance didn't suddenly arrive in Galway with Loughnane but his arrival was supposed to sweep away their nagging presence in the affairs of the county hurlers.

Instead the new manager discovered that he hadn't exactly been dealt a nap hand. The perennial problems of so many players of roughly similar standard and not enough hard-minded central personalities re-occurred - most catastrophically in the chastening defeat by Cork last July (leading to Anthony Daly's memorably acid quip about how Ger probably understood now that the players might have had something to do with the success in Clare).

Lacking the steely self-assurance of Daly, the Lohans, McMahon, Baker et al, Galway's hurlers were nonetheless subjected to the whole Loughnane box of psychological tricks and it didn't work.

If one event can be said to set the clock ticking on Monday's sorry denouement it was the evening in Ennis in July 2007 when Galway lost unexpectedly to Clare, a result that cost them a very possible All-Ireland final appearance.

The abiding memory of that qualifier wasn't just the result nor Loughnane's weary bafflement afterwards but the extraordinary manner in which the team was announced in the pre-match huddle seconds before the throw-in. This blitz on the team's sensibilities plainly didn't work, with one player, according to a nearby observer, close to tears after being precipitously sidelined.

The farcical nature of that evening didn't escape comment at last year's agms in the county and in retrospect, the management was living on under notice to improve or face the consequences.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the grim reckoning that duly arrived on Monday there is a sadness about the whole melodrama. Galway hurling officials need to broker a truce in their civil war or the under-achievement will continue and worsen.

For anyone who remembers how Loughnane electrified the hurling world in the mid-90s and the flashbulb iridescence he brought to articulating his enthusiasm for the game and Clare, it has been almost tragic watching the decline into wilful and often gratuitous controversy, alienating people who should be his pals into old age and the past two years of relative silence - notwithstanding any recriminations yet to come - as he grappled with a challenge that seemed to defy his best efforts.

Loughnane was a central figure in a great era for the game. His team was plausibly compared by Kevin Cashman to Wexford of the 1950s. That is enough to assure his presence in any gallery of hurling achievement. But it doesn't seem to have been enough to satisfy his restless inclinations. So he came back.

e-mail: smoran@irish-times.ie