THE hurling championship starts today about an hour and a half before the League finishes. In an anteroom to the side of the Leinster championship, Antrim, Laois, Carlow and Westmeath begin a four-week cycle of playoffs to determine which pair will contest Leinster quarter-finals on the first Sunday in June; for the other pair, the hurling season will be over before eight other teams will have pucked a ball in anger.
Public interest will be minimal, media interest will be cursory and the outcome will have no impact on the greater championship beyond. The round-robin winners will play Offaly and, if that were Laois, for example, they would fancy their chances; the runners-up, though, will face a resurgent Wexford and it would be hard to