About how players whose hopes and dreams were dying a slow death before their eyes had to face the man in the mirror. But also about how everyone involved in Wexford hurling, from top to bottom, needed to put their shoulder to the wheel and not only work harder but also work smarter.

This was a crisis with roots in the earth's core, not its crust.

The structure of the local championship, for instance.

Your first match in May during the middle of third-level exams. Your second match in late August or early September when three or four of your clubmates were in Boston or New York. How could players keep their eye in? How could new talent be unearthed and assessed? How could springers emerge and put pressure on the incumbents?

At 24 years of age, in his second season as an intercounty regular, Gizzy Lyng wasn't the most obvious candidate to mount the soapbox. Once upon it, however, the words flowed. He didn't leave a tooth in any of them.

A week or two after the All Ireland quarter-final, Lyng, a teacher at Gaelscoil Charman in Wexford town, showed up at Nowlan Park as a member of the TG4 team covering the Leinster under-21 final and watched in mild embarrassment as the young men from Dublin did all the things that the older men from Wexford hadn't done. Reduced to 14 men for the second half, Dublin did more than merely compete. They harried. They hassled. Their forwards worked a double shift in reducing the quality of ball being channelled from the Kilkenny defence to the attack. That Kilkenny's big guns pulled them through in the last 10 minutes was not the point. That Dublin, in adversity, gave everything they had and then some emphatically was. To Lyng, the sheer honesty of it all was like an epiphany.

And then he returned to Nowlan Park last Sunday and saw Wexford hurling as it used to be and might be again.

Heart. Hand. Fire. Passion.

The works.

He can't say they took the field expecting to beat Galway. How could he? "All we could hope for was that the attitude would be right. The attitude that was always associated with Wexford hurling.

The attitude we've been missing these last few years." It was.

If Eoin Quigley's goal was the moment Lyng allowed himself to believe that victory was at hand, an earlier incident had reassured him that the journey hadn't been in vain, whatever happened from there on. Fergal Moore, the Galway right-corner back, had the ball near the sideline at the country end. He was engorged by a wolfpack of Wexford forwards. Lyng felt like doing handstands in the centre of the field. "It was fantastic. A fine spring day, lads working like they'd never worked before, a totally honest effort from everyone." We are the boys of Wexford.

This was exactly the kind of barnstorming approach he'd dreamed about when sounding off to Liam Spratt in Croke Park last July. Not that Lyng, whose interview proved a nine-day wonder locally, attracting praise (from Liam Dunne) and criticism in various measures, can claim any credit for the new Wexford league championship structure subsequently introduced.

But history will scarcely condemn him either. "I was like a bear. Wondering what I was doing with my career. It was probably the wrong time to say it, five minutes after a match, before I'd had a chance to cool down. But I said what was on my mind.

"The structure of the county championship was the most obvious problem, and that had implications for the county team. I don't think it impacted on the first 15, or even on the first 25. But what it did mean was that you weren't unearthing any new talent to push the guys who were 23rd or 24th on the panel, and they in turn weren't pushing the guys who were 14th or 15th on the team.

Each thing fed off the next, the lack of pressure off the lack of competition. A vicious circle, almost. And look, I'd be the first to hold my hand up and say that the players weren't giving it as much as we could have. But we weren't playing enough club matches when other counties were."

Now they will be. A new club championship structure and, in John Meyler, a new Wexford manager. Lyng has been impressed with Meyler's personableness and honesty, impressed also with the level of detail the longtime Cork resident demonstrated at the first team meeting. "But I'd seen that before too. Powerpoint can go a long way towards disguising bullshit."

What carried an attractive ring of truth about it was the discovery that, following last summer's Clare fiasco, Meyler's friends in Cork had told him that it was "time to go home" and do his bit for his county. A Wexfordman putting his reputation and career on the line to return to his native shore: this was an unsolicited investment of faith and dedication that demanded a response from the players.

Contrary to the reputation that preceded him, Meyler is no whipcracking galley-master, albeit "not a shoulder you'd cry on either". He's let it be known that he has two players in mind for every position. Now every player realises he's in direct competition with somebody else for a place. It's one way of concentrating minds.

The opening-day defeat at home to Waterford has been the only mishap to date. "We'd trained hard beforehand, run up loads of sand dunes, and we probably thought we deserved to beat Waterford as a result. Then on the day we didn't work hard enough and we didn't take our chances, although we created them."

Far from blowing a series of gaskets, the manager contented himself with, and endeared himself to his players by, accentuating the positives on the video of the match the following Tuesday, showing them the many things they'd done right and pointing out the little things they could do better.

As a result, Lyng believes, they're no longer sauntering along, doing what they'd always done. Not challenging themselves in training. Not challenging themselves in games. Playing with what he describes as the lack of passion that has "come to be expected" of a Wexford team.

"Simply by staying at the same level, we were falling farther behind the leaders.

Look at Diarmuid O'Sullivan going up the field last year against Limerick with the ball down the back of his shorts.

Even if it's only a millimetre of an advantage, you take it. But we didn't have the desire to look for that advantage."

Off the field Lyng is currently helping to organise a summer camp as Gaeilge in Wexford for 15- and 16-yearolds in July, with S�an �g � hAilp�n on the list of guest artistes pledged to appear.

Feel free, he requests in passing, to mention the "massive input" of his parents, Michael and Maree Lyng. Diarmuid started out with Clonard, a junior club in Wexford town, before the family moved out the country to St Martin's;

for any of the four boys to play senior for Wexford, they'd have to be playing for a senior club. The nickname Gizzy, incidentally, is a corruption of Gizmo, the original Gremlin. Lyng was once small and cute too. Apparently.

Now he's bigger and bolder, more wise to the uncomfortable realities of intercounty hurling and the sacrifices that have to be made. "If you're not swimming in the morning you'd better be, because you can bet John Gardiner is. If you're not practising your catching in the evening you'd better be, because you can bet Tommy Walsh is. It requires so much. We're starting to put it in. As opposed to wallowing in our habitual complacency."

Someone had to shout stop. Gizzy Lyng is glad he did.