LockerRoom:Perhaps to admit this is to risk being shot for being unpatriotic but there was a time when the start of a new English soccer season couldn't come quickly enough for me, writes Tom Humphries.

I liked the neat overlap with the finale of the GAA season. Just as the big Croker matches started thinning out so the glorious distraction of the soccer would begin. By the time we had wrapped up the hurling and football championship Leeds might be well on their way to a record breaking start to the season.

I even loved the old Charity Shield, that tantalising piece of foreplay which let you know that it was game on. On Charity Shield week Shoot magazine would issue its readers with complementary "league ladders" with which we could move teams up and down the table as appropriate. It saved us the labour of glancing at a newspaper.

As a student of media I can remember being intrigued as to how Shoot magazine was going to handle the fallout from the 1974 Charity Shield when two of its columnists, Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner, were sent off. I expected their war to continue bitterly in the pages of Shoot the following week but they both beseeched us kids "not to get them wrong" that they would be looking forward to a pint (or two!!) with their old mate Kev/Billy next time their paths crossed. I should have known then that it was all about as meaningful as a World Wrestling Federation Bloodbath Extravaganza.

All these years on I'm in favour of The Premiership taking a year off so we can see if we miss it. Just take a year off and go interrailing around Europe or picking grapes in France or waiting tables in New York but just go away for a while and give our heads some peace. Go away and get your head together, Premiership. We've had too much of your full-on, overbearing personality.

Last year we trundled out of the Premiership season straight into Saipan and the World Cup and the fall-out from all that and onwards, ever onwards, into this summer with Chelski and the bloated soap opera of Beckham, Beckham, Beckham. Twelve months a year we are being hosed with Premiership soccer, a 24/7 soaking with its warped values and distorted features.

We are never away from it. Sometimes it feels like we are living in a cul-de-sac of modest semi-detached houses just off The Strip in Vegas where permanently it is five seconds to midnight on New Year's Eve.

Next weekend, the neon buzzes and the fireworks will fly again, altering the colour of our sky, and it will be hard not to be slightly distracted as we gaze down at Tipperary and Kilkenny in Croke Park. Premiership soccer so dominates the sporting universe that everything is tinted by it, compared to it, measured against it.

What I've been wondering is where Tommy Walsh and Tullaroan fit into all this. I've moseyed through Tullaroan a couple of times and have always meant to stop longer. It should be a place of pilgrimage. There is a museum dedicated to Lory Meagher and hurling there, situated in his old thatched house, and if you've ever gazed at that wonderful photo of Lory in his cap and raincoat with a cigarette in his mouth chatting with Kilkenny's goalkeeper Jimmy Walsh during the 1945 Leinster final you'll have wondered about the man, long enough to think about visiting. There's a history here that no professional sport can ever nourish itself on again.

In 1904, Kilkenny beat Cork in the final to win their first All-Ireland. It was a Tullaroan team with the odd decoration from other parishes which made the breakthrough. Great names, literally and figuratively. Drug Walsh, Icy Lanigan, Fox Meagher and the incomparable Sim Walton, a man who could consider himself unlucky only to win seven All-Ireland medals in the following years.

History. Sim was secretary of the club when he won his first All-Ireland in 1904. Nearly one hundred years later, Waltons still serve the club. By 1905, Kilkenny were in the black and amber (donated by a football team) but by 1907 they were winning another All-Ireland in Tullaroan colours.

And from then on, with the odd break in which to take its breath, Tullaroan could consider itself to be the centre of the hurling universe. If it was the influence of Sim Walton and Tullaroan which forced the county into the All-Ireland breakthrough in 1904, it was Lorenzo Ignatius Meagher and Tullaroan who prompted the resuscitation in the 1930s during a time when the game mushroomed in popularity. The Meagher family involvement with GAA went all the way back to Hayes's Hotel in Thurles, by the way.

When Kilkenny play Tipperary next week the entanglements of blood and land will stretch way beyond the living memory. If Tommy Walsh , the newest wizard of Tullaroan, should tangle with, say, Benny or Tommy Dunne of Toomevara perhaps they might detect the echoes of 90 years ago and the first 15-a-side hurling final to be played. In 1913, Toomevara sent nine representatives to backbone a Tipperary side which lost to Kilkenny in the All-Ireland. They were such lean and speedy men they became known as the Toomevara Greyhounds.

Jerry Seinfeld once said of the money-prompted fickleness of professional sports stars that following a team these days is like following laundry. You are loyal to a few shirts of the same colour but nobody who wears those shirts as part of their job shares the same loyalty. The Premiership has long been that way. Teams riding between boom and bankruptcy, players collecting their crust wherever they can.

And quiet little Tullaroan? Life rolls on. It gave us DJ's grand-uncle, Paddy Phelan, who starred in the thunder and lightning final of 1939, an event which for many people still overshadows the outbreak of World War II the same week.

Tullaroan gave us the Graces and Shem Downey, the great Seán Clohessy, Bill Hennessy, Liam Keoghan and many more.

And now Tommy Walsh. It's a small place with a rich Norman history which stretches back to Raymond le Gros but it gives new life to the old cliché about a community expressing itself through sport.

The GAA hears a lot of glib talk from people who want it to get savvy and live in the real world. It hears a lot about full houses and the entitlements of players to a good cut of the cash. Next weekend should be the refutation. The Premiership kicks off and for all its fascinations it is as distant and unreal as Hollywood, its stars almost without exception removed from us and living in thrall to fresh money and oleaginous agents. Even the bullied old League of Ireland seems to have more red blood in its cheeks, more true stories in its heart.

And on Sunday, Croke Park will be full and Tullaroan will be empty not because of the hype and the star players but because of the history which gives a game context, because you can't get rich in business and then buy all the players you need to win a hurling championship. You win hurling championships as a product of love and culture and history and passion.

So you get older and sort out the things that mean something from the things which are merely interesting. Chaff blown away from wheat. The start of the English soccer season becomes less of a landmark and more of a roadside curiosity and hurling summers pass too quickly, each added to the last with regret at the passing.