HERE'S a little exercise for the trainspotters among you. Cut out and keep the Galway team that starts the National Hurling League today, put it away somewhere safe and don't look at it again till the All Ireland quarterfinals, five months hence.

Then we'll see how much Ger Loughnane knew about his championship team at the beginning of the league and how much he learned as he went along.

Is John Lee the man for the long haul at centre-back? Is the experiment of David Forde at wing-back one of those early-season brainstorms that lasts for a game or two before being quietly forgotten and, out of politeness, never referred to again?

Have the management already settled on Eugene Cloonan - a man with, in Loughnane's words, the required "presence" and "bouldness" - as their fullforward, come what or who may? And for all that's been said and speculated, might Joe Canning yet descend from outer space at some unspecified date in high summer, the junior cavalry to the rescue in his county's moment of need? Get that scissors out.

A warning, however, to Loughnane-watchers reading. Those expecting transfixing sideshows as of old from Day One are likely to be disappointed. This is a man with a job to do and a limited timescale in which to do it.

The pantomime villainy didn't begin in Clare, remember, until Loughnane had the coaching side of things cracked and was looking around for motivational dominatrix gear to help keep his troops on the psychological straight and narrow.

As a consequence, his public pronouncements to date in Galway have been unsurprisingly limited. His declaration that he'd discovered his new charges to be hungrier and more determined than he previously believed them to be can be waved away as a small - if in Loughnane's eyes apparently necessary - peace offering to them. On the other hand, his early assertion, repeated last Tuesday, that anything less than a McCarthy Cup in 2007 would constitute failure on his part was echt Loughnane.

Set the target, set it high, ratchet up the pressure on oneself and bring the players with you: we're all in this together, lads. He probably wasn't wrong either; given Galway's tendency to regress in Year Two of a manager's tenure, they are likelier to win an All Ireland in his first season unless he manages to coax out of them some hitherto hidden propensity to train on.

The players aren't the only cast members with question marks over them. One, and a big one, hangs over the man himself. In the six championship seasons since his departure from Clare, hurling has undergone the paradigm shifts of Kilkenny's power game and Cork's possession game. Although the foremost coach of the 1990s won't be required to reinvent the wheel, or even to reinvent himself as the foremost coach of the 2000s after Donal O'Grady, he will be required to demonstrate that he remains at the very least a coach with relevance. This is not a vaguely interesting afterthought or a topic raised for the sake of it, for in the end Galway's championship will stand or fall not on whether they can outhunger their opponents but on whether they can outhurl them. In much the same way, the ultimate issue with Loughnane isn't whether he can messianically motivate, thoroughly organise and painstakingly prepare a team (tick yes in each box), it's whether he can send one out that will withstand the heat of battle by performing the basics under pressure, by doing the simple thing correctly over and over again - his adopted county's overriding failure these many years, not least in the 2005 All Ireland final. At bottom, Ger Loughnane's coaching reputation is what's on the line here.

It will, one way or another, be Galway and Loughnane's league, yet in between this alpha and omega is located an entire alphabet of other counties, other managers and other motivations. The league contains more teams to look out for, and a greater range of reasons to look out for them, in 2007 than it has for years, not only because half the counties will be operating under new - in Limerick's case newish - management but also because three are already doomed to relegation. Ergo, concentrated minds right from the off.

A good start for Clare will offer Tony Considine the quickest way of putting the Davy Fitz episode to bed.

Limerick's fightback against Cork in the All Ireland quarter-final was either a taste of sweetness to come or a case of a team getting on a serendipitous roll at the right time against creaking opponents; the fun over the coming months will be in discovering which. Cork themselves have both a new manager and a promised return to old habits; as we speak, the members of the Guild of Leeside Statisticians are sharpening their pencils in anticipation of making ticks in the programme against the names of the redjerseyed players who pull on the ball at Pairc Ui Chaoimh today. And it's more than time for Wexford to hit the ground running; a decent league campaign won't be the guarantor of a decent championship, but it might be the trigger for it.

At the risk of beating the reader to death with the Tribune's already most overused hurling statistic, the last occasion Wexford reached the National League semi-final was 1996, a year they just happened - and no, this wasn't a coincidence - to go on and win the All Ireland. If the hurling public demands nothing else from Wexford it expects to see them going down with pike in hand, the purple and gold wrapped around them. That didn't happen last summer. Let's have some of the old celestial fire in 2007, gentlemen.

Given that we're past St Brigid's Day, there's plenty of scope elsewhere for sails to be hoisted. Don't move along there now, plenty to see.

Waterford, for whom the Munster championship has now become as notable an irrelevance as the league, are the only big name one can immediately identify as nontriers. Offaly will plug away because they have no option but to. Now that Babs has his feet firmly under the table, more will be expected of Tipperary than they showed in the early stages of last season's competition. Kilkenny, needless to remark, will be going out to win the thing because going out to win has become their natural mode of expression and existence under Brian Cody. Make that their onlymode of expression and existence.

Last year's quarter-finals and semi-finals provided competitive and reasonably satisfying fixtures; this year's equivalent should do likewise to a greater degree. Another cause for optimism, meanwhile, is sourced in the arrangements. Limerick entered the 2006 final with half an eye on their Munster championship date with Tipperary a fortnight later. This time around there's a full month between the final on 29 April and the first high day of summer, the clash of Clare and Cork on 27 May.

The intensity at the top of Division 1, mind you, will be in the hapenny place compared to the intensity at the bottom, where any number of heads will roll following the formulation of new arrangements for the 2008 league.

Where next year's Division 1 will contain nine teams, each of them guaranteed four home and four away fixtures, this year's Division 1 contains (count 'em) 12 teams. The arrangements for shedding the unwanted avoirdupois as follows: goodbye to the bottom team in each of the two groups; goodbye to the loser of the playoff between the teams that finish fifth in each group; and goodbye to the losers of the playoff between the winner of the latter game and the Division 2 champions. Trust us, it's actually less complicated than it sounds.

But don't expect to see Galway in such parts.