There should only be 12 or 13 players a side. Every game should start with a puck-out instead of the unseemly mess that was the throw-in. His most pressing proposal though was his most radical. Abolish points. "Make it a game of goals only. Too many points are picked up from what should be non-scoring, long distance positions."

To use a term Barney Rock recently coined, Ring, at heart, was a pound man, even if only Eddie Keher and Henry Shefflin have raised more white flags and collected more 'pence' in championship history than him. In Ring's time, in Ring's world, goals were hurling's currency, its lifeblood, its essence.

Ring could tell goals were becoming scarcer but he could have no idea how scarce they were to become. A decade after giving that interview, Ring served as a selector to the Cork team that won three All Irelands in a row. In those three finals, 13 goals were scored. The current Cork team have contested four All Irelands in a row in which only six goals have been scored. Before 1999, Cork scored at least one goal in all of their 27 final wins.

Two of their last three titles have been won without a goal. Their leading scorer, Joe Deane, once looked like being one of the goalscorers of his generation, but he's only raised one green flag in his last 17 championship games.

When the GAA was formed, the idea of a great scorer not being a goalscorer would have been unimaginable. Matches were decided by who scored the greatest number of goals; points only came into it if both teams had scored the same number of goals. Later five points, and then three points, were judged to be equal to one goal, or a 'major' as they were known, and by 1905 we had the first All-Ireland final in which both teams reached double figures, Cork beating Kilkenny 5-10 to 3-13.

But that game would be disputed and eventually invalidated, and by 1910 Wexford would win an All-Ireland final without raising a single white flag, their seven goals outweighing Limerick's 6-2. It would take until the 1940s to have another championship game in which both teams raised at least 10 white flags. It was all about goals. In 1936, you had 60 goals in six Munster championship games and an average of 9.4 goals per championship game. As Table 1 shows though, that rate would decrease steadily through the decades, to the point that in 2006 the average was down to just 2.2 goals per game.

So, where have all the goals gone? Well, the most obvious cause is the one Ring identified . . . the lighter the sliotar has become, the greater the tendency to settle for your point from out the field.

And in the old days, you could bump the goalkeeper over the line for your major. These days, goalkeepers aren't just a more protected species but virtually a different species, the standard of netminding unrecognisable from what passed for it even as recently as the '70s. Paddy Barry was voted goalkeeper on the Cork team of the millennium but if Ger Cunningham or Donal Og Cusack had allowed Eddie Keher's attempted point from the sideline to slip through their hands or stood like a statue for Frank Cummins's goal like Barry did in the 1972 All-Ireland final, there would be an inquisition in Cork. Ollie Walsh and Noel Skehan and Art Foley were all great men but they never would have saved Paul Flynn's bullet on the double to the top corner which Brendan Cummins somehow got to in the 2004 Munster semi-final.

It's not just goalkeepers that are better these days; defenders, especially full-backs, are much better and more mobile too. And for the last 25 years, forwards haven't had the option to handpass the ball to the net the way Tony Doran and Ray Cummins once did.

But there are still some predators out there, mostly in either black and amber or blue and white clothing. And just as we did with the big ball two months ago, Mad About Sport believes they and their goal-hungry predecessors should be saluted.

In Table 2we present the leading 20 goalscorers in championship hurling over the past 75 years.

Some of them you might have heard of . . . like Eamonn Cregan, who scored a remarkable 28 goals in 39 championship games despite playing at least a quarter of those games in the backs. Some of them, like Paddy Lalor of Laois, you may not have not known of, but here his sensational record is rightly acknowledged. We could have tried to rank these old goalscorers but it would have been impossible. Yet it would also be negligent of us not to detail the exploits of those leading six goalscorers, as well as a number of other remarkable netbursting achievements through the years.

And finally we honour another lethal six marksmen, who, since 1990, have tried their best to keep Ring's vision of the game alive and make that net and those terraces dance.

Table 1:

Decreasing by the decade
THE NUMBER OF GOALS PER SENIOR HURLING CHAMPIONSHIP
MATCH Year Average
1936 9.4
1946 6.7
1956 6.9
1966 5.5
1976 5.2
1986 5.2
1996 3.2
2006 2.1