Ten years ago this summer, when only the Canal End acrobatics of Damien Fitzhenry - who dived and scooped the ball to safety after Billy Dooley cut in from the Hogan Stand side and let fly in injury time - prevented the provincial semi-final going to a replay, Wexford were the McCarthy Cup holders. Offaly would take possession of the same trophy 15 months later, the success of the pair prompting Marcus de B�rca to declare in the second edition of The GAA - A History that Munster was "no longer the dominant province in terms of the senior hurling championship".

But that was nine years ago, before the landowners became the dispossessed.

Nowadays they're just trying to find a way of becoming competitive at underage level again.

So Tom Dempsey frets about the threat Carlow will pose to his and Liam Dunne's minor team in the first round of the Leinster championship.

And Johnny Dooley bemoans the lack of big-time experience their contemporaries in Offaly receive. And George O'Connor gets Paudie Butler to take a coaching session in Gorey Community School, an establishment of 1,500 students and around 130 teachers, and ponders how best to ensure hurling finds its own breathing space in one of Ireland's fastest growing towns.

And Mick Delaney, the Leinster Council secretary, talks about a provincial senior championship he recently deemed to be "practically extinct" and wonders how it all went so horribly wrong.

Because Offaly and Wexford took their eye off the ball during their days of plenty and didn't plan for the days of want? Because Offaly have a smaller population than Kilkenny and one that's moreover skewed 60/40 in favour of the big ball, demographically speaking? Because Wexford have a bigger population but, lacking a discrete hurling heartland, attempt to treat both codes equally, with the result that their youngsters don't play enough hurling in any given year? Because Kilkenny, when they instituted their development squad system at the turn of the decade, hoisted the bar to a level the other two were incapable of approaching?

There is, Delaney believes, no one simple, all-embracing answer. Not that that makes the situation any less disappointing, of course. And not that lack of finance is an issue;

last year the Leinster Council pumped Euro1.3m into underage hurling, Euro1m of it coming from Croke Park's hurling fund.

"I've always remembered Diarmuid Healy saying, after Offaly won the All Ireland in 1981, that Leinster hurling wouldn't be truly successful until we had other counties - Wexford, Dublin, Laois, Offaly themselves - winning minor All Irelands. That worked for a while with Offaly, but it hasn't worked since. And you have to remember that it was Wexford who had the right idea in initiating the whole coaching ethos in the early 1990s, except they didn't get the results they were hoping for."

Take Kilkenny out of the equation, Tom Dempsey contends, and there's precious little between the other counties at underage level in the province. Though he's not wrong, the statistics tell a different story. Offaly have won one Leinster minor title since 1989. Wexford have won none since 1985 - "a ridiculous length of time, " George O'Connor, the county's new Hurling Development Administrator, accepts. What's more, these are not dry statistics that exist in their own vacuum. They have implications.

They cast shadows.

Ask John Conran, Wexford manager in 2003-04, about those implications and he cites the lack of managerial flexibility that sprang from them. "We brought in a lot of young fellas, as many as we reckoned we could, but that still left us relying on more of the older lads than we would have liked. Come the day of a big championship match, you can't chance too many inexperienced players. The dripfeed of younger players wasn't nearly strong enough."

Ask Daithi Regan, an Offaly selector under John McIntyre for the past two years, and he quotes from a long list of issues. "There were a number of good players coming through, but the biggest difficulty we had was that, other than Brian Whelahan, hardly anyone on the panel had had success at intercounty level.

They weren't used to winning National Leagues or Leinster championships. As well, the natural wastage was higher than you'd like; in Offaly there's a perception that some players don't have the same willingness to make sacrifices in order to win All Irelands, whereas in Cork and Kilkenny all the kids seem to want to hurl for the county. And then with Birr being so dominant in recent years, it was very difficult to bring in guys from other clubs and expect them to stand up in the heat of championship battle."

Even though they lost to Carlow in the provincial semifinal, Johnny Dooley, last year's Offaly minor manager, professes himself happy that strides were made. The panel trained well. The attitude was right. The real disadvantage was, he says, the continuing failure to break out of Leinster. "You can still pluck out one or two every year, lads capable of making good seniors. The big disadvantage they have is that they're not playing at the highest level, not featuring in All Ireland finals or semi-finals. They're not even featuring in All Ireland colleges' finals, which was a big help to my generation when we were young." A vicious, self-perpetuating circle.

Whatever the whereabouts of the horse, both counties have at least got around to the business of bolting the stable door. Johnny Flaherty is Director of Hurling in Offaly, with a raft of his colleagues from 1981 involved in other capacities: Paddy Kirwan and Aidan Fogarty as senior selectors, Padraig Horan as under21 manager, Ger Coughlan as minor manager. And Johnny Dooley points to the emergence of Joe Bergin as proof that the county can still produce young talent and expects Diarmuid Horan from St Rynagh's - Padraig's young lad and a minor last year - to be making a similar name for himself sooner rather than later.

Wexford pray they have their own messiah in George O'Connor. And they're the current All Ireland under-14 champions. And 12 of this year's minor panel will be eligible again in 2008, a deliberate move by the management, with Tom Dempsey adding that he's been enormously heartened to discover that despite recent troughs the lure of wearing the purple and gold hasn't subsided in any way. "These lads are so committed to Wexford, which is fantastic. People say that it's important to improve Dublin hurling, but it would be as big a disaster for the game if Wexford were to fall off the map."

And Larry Murphy and Larry O'Gorman are helping out with the under-17s, not for the glamour of it - because there isn't any, Murphy reports, not even an oul' county top - but for the sake of ensuring the lads not quite up to minor standard this year aren't forgotten about and left to fall through the cracks. Wexford were always capable of putting it up to Kilkenny when Murphy was a minor. He's doing his bit to speed the day when they will be again.

Offaly and Wexford. In the same boat 10 years ago. In quite a different boat now.

Both rowing it as best they can.