Yet, The Cats are vincible. Now that Galway have installed Noel Lane, they are most likely to do the deed. But Jimmy Barry Murphy might have been the man to achieve that righteous and profoundly necessary mission if he'd elected to stay.

The most grievous penance of living in this land of ours is daily annunciations about the wall-to-wall probity of the RUC and/or Cork's right - or alleged innate ability - to win All-Irelands. The people who take that stuff seriously are the same who take Willie Clinton for a virgin or Henry Kissinger for a pacifist.

When Jimmy Barry Murphy accepted the Cork job in 1996, hurling in this city was in decline - although only this Marxist Sindo was prepared to say so at the time. The Marina, Dunlops and Fords, the industrial heartland, had passed into history, and with it the proletariat, the Twomeys, the Hartnetts, the Cliffords, the Mahers, the Brohans, who made Cork special. Nobody wishes to denigrate Avondhu or Carbery or Imokilly, or their achievements; but, nowadays, Melbourne and Chicago and New York see more of the youth - the third level generation - than Páirc Uí Rinn does. It is fashionable nowadays to stick boots into the Rockies, Glen and Barrs; the harsh truth is that without them the GAA would be about as important as the PDs.

The Mon prospered, The Glen prospered, The Piarsaigh prospered. Cork prospered. It was a law. Now, the North Monastery is in deep trouble. The Christian Brothers have all but disappeared; soon the greatest academy of hurling the world has ever known will be no more. That is the hurling environment in which any Cork coach, or selector, has to operate. Things are easier in Clare and Tipperary and Galway and Kilkenny, startling though that assertion may sound.

Sciolists of all shades, and none, blame JBM and Johnny Clifford and The Canon and anyone you care to nominate for Cork's failure to win more then two All-Irelands in the '90s. The world and Katty Barry ought to know that neither Jimmy, nor Frank, nor Con, nor The Doc nor any other Murphy who ever lived could have reversed, or even affected, that law of the Celtic Tiger which dictates that a family shall consist of 1.8326 persons. When Cork hurling was great, a northside family consisted of eight persons - and counting.

Cork trained last St Stephen's Day. A few years before then, at a seminar dedicated to the future of the game in Cork, (Into The Millennium, was it?) the whole notion of exhausting, wrecking, players, by so-called endurance training in the early months of the year, was given the most exhaustive (!) examination, and condemned by speaker after speaker: the Bossman himself, Willie John Daly, Johnny Clifford, (Johnny told his own lovely Glen yarn about Good Friday) Justin McCarthy, agus daoine nách iad. But, five years later, Cork trained on Stephen's Day!

It is difficult indeed to comprehend. Loughnane and McNamara get most of the blame for this carry-on. Yet, as anyone with a splink of sense knows, Loughnane and McNamara had nothing whatever to do with it.

When those extraordinary men were torturing and testing the Clare panel, half a decade since, they were searching for CHARACTER. Maybe the notion of fitness occurred to them about, say, once in every leap year. But, in those days before the first round of the Munster championship of 1995, when Banner men were being flayed up and down the sides of mountains, it was about "Will you? Dare you? Trample on the toes of the people of Tipperary and Cork, as generations before you failed to do?" And somewhere on those mountainsides Loughnane's men said YES, and gave us four or five years of hurling ecstasy.

And, while the Banner were doing that, Cork were winning Under 21 titles by the new time. So, what follows - that Cork do not need character building, or further sessions of slogging and masochism on December 26 - may be obvious enough. That Cork do need hurling education is less so.

And that is why Jimmy's going is a mistake.

"They're all right in their own way, Gawd help them! We'll go out and play our own game." Last August 6, that most ancient - and asinine - of Cork attitudes was surely consigned and condemned to oblivion for all eternity. The world does not wait for Cork.

DIARMUID O'SULLIVAN needs to be taught to keep out of RTE's lenses. As, no doubt, you noticed yourself, O'Sullivan sustained a fairly hefty frontal charge before he elected to assert himself; but, that is not of much service when the full weight of Liam Griffin is brought down on top of you, as it was upon young Sullivan, without right of reply, away back in June.

That is a relatively minor problem by comparison with the Ben O'Connor problem. Here we have an absolutely superb athlete with the capacity to become, not a Doran or a Nealon, perhaps, but certainly a Shefflin or a Jamesie. But Ben adheres to the school of solo and hand pass.

Similar thoughts occur about Timmy McCarthy - but don't ye be getting me going!

The point is that, on August 6, Cork learned, or were taught, more about themselves than ever before in hurling history. Any number of persons may, in theory, be qualified to apply the lessons presented by Offaly; only Jimmy Barry Murphy had, has, that rapport with the players, and the people, of Cork to start from before that handy All-Ireland of 1999.

Jimmy should have a rethink.

And, if Jimmy does not, Tom Cashman should take a lease on Alcatraz and keep Timmy McCarthy there until such time as Timmy acquires, say, one quarter of of that divine artist's artistry.