The day the Cork dual player finally went missing, presumed dead, hastened on his way by the installation of the back door. He hasn't been seen since.

The immediate victim was Tom Kenny. It was his first championship start in either hurling or football and it would be his last in football. A natural wing-back chosen at centreforward, he lasted 48 minutes before being hauled off in a match that Limerick, who boasted their own multi-purpose performers in Conor Fitzgerald, Brian Begley and Stephen Lucey, won by 0-16 to 0-6. As Kenny left the field in the rain, a way of Leeside GAA life vanished with him.

A couple of nights later at hurling training, Donal O'Grady called aside Kenny and Sean Og O hAilpin, one of the subs against Limerick, and produced a gun with a silencer.

The footballers, he pointed out, would be playing in the All Ireland qualifiers on 7 June, 24 hours before the hurlers met Clare or Tipperary in the Munster semi-final. That was that; O'Grady didn't put the gun to their heads because he didn't have to.

Kenny proceeded to make his championship hurling debut against Clare and has been a fixture on the team ever since. In his wake, participation in the other code for both footballers who hurl and hurlers who play football has, in the words of longtime Cork underage football selector Diarmuid O'Donovan, "been reduced to the role of active rest rather than serious sport. Tom Kenny was the last guy of any serious consequence who tried both. The attitude that you can't serve two masters has filtered down the line."

Paidi O Se declared last month that the demise of the dual player had hit the Cork footballers hard. John Corcoran, a member of Billy Morgan's management team, is not inclined to disagree. One of the big problems on a practical level, he asserts, is the fact that "not everyone participating in the county football championship in Cork is available to the selectors". Among the most obvious refuseniks are Kenny, who plays his football with Muskerry, and the Na Piarsaigh duo of John Gardiner, who'd walk onto most county teams, and Sean Og.

Add to the list the name of Ronan Curran, who, though he never pretended to be anything other than a hurler, lined out for the minor footballers in the 1999 All Ireland semi-final.

Curran's St Finbarr's clubmate Michael Shields . . . conversely, always a footballer rather than a hurler . . . wears the number two jersey against Limerick today. Who, you wonder, will be the next Barrs man after Shields to play championship football for Cork?

"Obviously it hits the footballers when guys who have played the game at underage with Cork . . . at minor level anyway, probably not so much at under-21 . . . opt for hurling, as most of them do, " Corcoran admits. "In the long run that has to damage football. But it's just one of those things. We have to get on with it."

One step in the right direction would be to encourage players to choose at an earlier age which path they'll pursue, Tony Davis believes. "Even at club level nowadays, I don't think someone can play both."

Davis suggests 18 years of age as the cut-off point. "They've got to choose before they go to college, otherwise they'll be playing Sigerson and Fitzgibbon, playing under-21 football and hurling and might even be on an extended senior panel.

That's way too much. It might not be a bad thing for football in Cork either, because you'll know what you have there and you'll work with it."

Yet hurling, Davis adds, is far from the only danger to football in Cork. In the country as well as the city, rugby and soccer are taking what he terms "a huge hold. You see soccer schools of excellence at under-12, under-13, under-14.

You don't see GAA equivalents. That's going to impact in five years' time. And underage football finals these days aren't being contested as much by clubs from west Cork towns like Bantry or Skibbereen but by clubs from rural areas.

There's a serious transition taking place. People think the GAA is in a healthy state. It's not."

One last possible opportunity, however slim, of rewinding the dual-player clock remains. There's a chap in Melbourne . . . tall guy, goodlooking, strange name . . . who may yet fetch up on Cork's north side once more to chase anew his dream of an All Ireland medal some day. Irrespective of the code in which he'd be likelier to realise this ambition, there's no question but that reincarnation would come more easily to Setanta O hAilpin as a footballer than as a hurler.

In the meantime, the country's best-known dual player is a Mayo man.