Unless you're an unredeemed Waterford hurling die-hard, you'll have caught their games this season from the same remove as other non-Waterford diehards. Clips on TV here and there, highlights on Sunday Sport, perhaps a full match on TG4. Bits and pieces. But enough bits and pieces to gather that Waterford are - well, still Waterford.

The occasional excellent performance? Check. Scroll back two months to their victory against the All Ireland champions in Páirc Uí Rinn, where they hit no fewer than 25 points: an impressive tally any day, irrespective of the opposition's level of motivation, and one that few other teams in the country could come within an ass's roar of.

The occasional - or more than occasional - trademark defensive error? Check.

Think of Tom Feeney's faux pas versus Clare.

The occasional, not entirely unpredictable flash of indiscipline? Check. That asinine pull of Eoin Kelly's in Birr last Sunday, as utterly unnecessary as it was deeply unpleasant, fitted the bill neatly. They're still Waterford. Move along now. Nothing new to see here.

Sitting in the commentary box seven days ago, Kieran O'Connor and his WLR FM co-commentator Stephen Frampton struggled to recall a worse first-half display by the county. The flatness, the lack of buzz, the absence of drive. If ever there was a performance calculated to end a team's participation in the league, this was it. But Waterford, through no fault of their own on the day, survived to qualify for the quarter-finals.

A shot at redemption today then, surely?

Not as far as their assistant coach Nicky Cashin is concerned. "No, it's just another match, " he says.

"Another chance to look at players."

The league is the league and the championship is the championship, Cashin continues, playing a commendably if irritatingly straight bat. "Our priority is the championship. We're not unduly worried after last Sunday.

You have to hand it to Offaly for one thing. They're an improving team and were really up for the game." Ken McGrath was feeling his way back towards match fitness, Cashin points out; Denis Coffey is "improving all the time" at corner-back.

Elsewhere, Fourmilewater's Liam Lawlor, who stood out in defeat for the under-21 footballers against Cork on Thursday night, is one for the notebook, while at Waterford IT they can't understand why Lawlor's Fitzgibbon Cup-winning colleague Alan Kirwan doesn't figure in Justin McCarthy's plans. Either way, when Waterford come to the table in the Munster semifinal on 4 June, they'll bring a hand stuffed with the same old cards, reshuffled in whatever fashion the management sees fit. There are no aces to be pulled from the bottom of the pack. They know it. We know it.

To hold that Waterford haven't evolved since 2004, even since 2002, is an observation rather than a criticism.

Their form to date this year points to the usual problems of scoring goals and the usual problems of keeping them out.

In 17 championship outings on McCarthy's watch, Waterford have conceded 31 goals.

In 19 matches in the same period, Cork have conceded 22 goals and Kilkenny 15 goals.

Down the other end of the field, it's not just like watching Brazil. Though Waterford hit eight goals in their five championship fixtures last year, four of them came against Dublin. Disregard the trip to Down a few weeks back and the record shows they've hit one goal in four league outings this season. Impressively though John Mullane can function in the role of a ballwinning wing-forward, as he demonstrated in the closing quarter of the All Ireland qualifier in Ennis last July, Waterford required him to be offering a threat closer to goal that day. And doing more than merely offering a threat has to be Mullane's priority this summer; he's managed only two championship goals in the past two seasons, one of them in the Dublin game.

As it is, too many of the goals Waterford do score are sourced from Paul Flynn deadballs. Or from rebounds from Paul Flynn deadballs.

Discipline is another headache. Eoin Kelly's inevitable suspension will make him the third high-profile team member in recent times to experience an enforced sabbatical. They've also had players sent off in successive Munster finals.

Thing is, Waterford have had, in the person of Gerry Fitzpatrick, one of Ireland's most eminent sports psychologists in their backroom for the past two years. Watching Kelly's antics against Offaly, one can only conclude that Fitzpatrick is not being accorded sufficient rein to try and iron out individual mental kinks in the panel.

Still and all, to overdo criticism of Waterford is to lose sight of the big picture.

They're not Cork. They're not Kilkenny. They're Waterford. A county that, inter alia, haven't reached a provincial minor final since 1996. Within their own lights, they have, far from being the erratic dilettantes of stereotype, been admirably consistent under McCarthy. No current side have railed against their own weaknesses - those sand-based defensive ramparts, the endless goalkeeping misadventures, the shallowness of their domestic pool, the necessity to create hurlers out of footballers from the west of the county - so valiantly and, as their two Munster titles prove, so successfully. The one real pity about Waterford's best team for 40 years is that they didn't reach an All Ireland final.

Never mind about winning it; just stepping out at Croke Park in September into a blur of white and blue noise for the first time since 1963 would have constituted its own carnival.

For that they needed - still need - to be bigger, to be better, to be harder, to be stronger. If they couldn't be those, Waterford needed to be smarter, to be more disciplined, to be more clinical, to eradicate the margin of error. To, when necessary, be more judiciously cynical.

Last summer in Ennis they hit 0-21, ordinarily a matchwinning tally, only to undo their good work by allowing Alan Markham and Diarmuid McMahon, both of them former defenders, waltz through for three goals between them.

Although Stevie Brenner might have done better for one of them, the plain fact of the matter is that he was let down by his full-back line four times. Think the Lohan brothers would have stood around watching were the boot on the other foot and to hell with the consequences?

Think Noel Hickey would have? Think Diarmuid O'Sullivan or Pat Mulcahy would have? Seeing them allow a 19-year-old full-forward score 2-3 last Sunday does not fill the neutral observer with optimism that the Waterford backs have learned to play the percentages.

What will happen postMcCarthy is a subject they have yet to properly engage with. Give Stephen Frampton the power of life and death over hurling in Waterford and he'd channel every feasible resource into developing the age group from 14 years of age to minor level. "That's our real area of weakness. We haven't been producing enough young players to come in and put pressure on the established lads." That said, Nicky Cashin argues that clearly Waterford are doing something right. "We've been there or thereabouts all the time for the past number of years. That's with no underage or colleges' success.

Where did it come from?

There's plenty of good work going on in the county with the primary schools, the summer schools, the development squads and the colleges' team in west Waterford."

Exhaustive investigations by the Tribune have thrown up one man who believes from his knowledge of the local hurling scene that the ship has not yet sailed. Eddie O'Connor, who coached De La Salle to reach last year's county final, is adamant - as Eddie usually is - that Waterford have the wherewithal to win the All Ireland. "They're stuttering a bit at the moment, but they're still in the quarter-finals and I've always maintained they're a summer team. To my mind they're the only team out there equipped to beat Cork - and they're the only team to have beaten Cork twice in recent years."

The short term, as in today? Waterford are quite as likely to beat Limerick comfortably as to lose to them narrowly. The medium term? Be sure they'll produce one or two good performances in the 2006 championship. But the long term? That's an area Waterford hurling cannot allow take care of itself.