Newtownshandrum's unique possession game has counties watching and wondering: is this the way forward for hurling? Christy O'Connor investigates ahead of their All-Ireland Club SHC semi-final with O'Loughlin Gaels on Sunday week.

Ten minutes into the second half of the Munster Club SHC semi-final last November, Alan G O'Brien shaped up to take a sideline cut for Newtownshandrum about 35 yards out from goal. The natural process was to cut the ball down the wing or to arch it towards an onrushing midfielder but O'Brien played it back to his goalkeeper Paul Morrissey who was sweeping 30 yards out from goal. It wasn't conventional hurling but convention went out the door with Newtown a long time ago.

That swift passage of play encapsulated the utilitarian nature of hurling that Newtown espouse. Even though he is no longer involved with the senior team, Bernie O'Connor patented possession hurling years ago. It is underpinned by his philosophy of putting good hurlers on the ball as often as possible because he could never see the point of having 15 players on the field if they weren't all being utilised.

Over the years in Cork, and even within the parish, Newtown's hurling style has constantly been challenged and scrutinised but O'Connor's methods have been franked by time. They are the first to gain significant success with such a brand of hurling, yet criticism continues to attach itself to this Newtown team like a limpet.

Their style is a complete affront to the Cork hurling establishment and the palate of the Cork hurling public. No-one will admit it, but there is an element in the county who won't care how the first Cork team to win a Munster club title in 15 years, gets on against O'Loughlin Gaels from Kilkenny in the All-Ireland club semi-final in 10 days time. The conventional wisdom doesn't give them much of a chance anyway. After Birr defeated Young Irelands in the 2002 Leinster club final, Padjoe Whelehan said that the only way to beat a Kilkenny team was to "play ground hurling and hit them hard with man-to-man marking". Birr are the only team in the country to take a significant Kilkenny scalp in the last two years but O'Loughlin's turned them over last November. So where does that leave a team who are complete antithesis to that style of play?

The last few years have shown that any kind of a short game against Kilkenny is fatal because they are so good in tight exchanges. They're excellent against the man in possession because they're so good to harry and dispossess and the best way to beat a Kilkenny team is to create space and move the ball fast into that space. Newtown's play is governed by fluid movement into space up front, but that will all break down if they can't control the possession out the field.

The complexities of styles will be one of the key attractions on Sunday week, but no matter how Newtown's game is perceived, this is a new departure for hurling. Newtown evoke memories of the Galway teams of the mid to late 1980's. Their style was largely based on the hand-pass and was seen as sacrilege by a lot of people.

The fact that they won two All Irelands never silenced the traditional critics but they never made any apologies for it. They use the hand-pass because they felt they could control the play with it. Long sweeping shots are great to watch, but most of the time, they give the opposition a 50-50 chance of winning possession," explained former Galway manager Cyril Farrell. "A well-controlled hand-passing movement reduces the risk of losing possession ... and hurling is a game which offers a lot more tactical variations than are currently being used. We are doing it to win. The days of pleasing others and losing were over."

Galway perfected their style for a few years, but they weren't able to sustain it because it didn't become the normal style in the county. Newtown's style isn't totally comparable with those Galway sides either because they play a more possession-orientated game that is suffused with runners coming from angles. Most of their team aren't physically able to win dirty ball so their game is primarily based on lightning pace.

Fast legs, however, doesn't always make for fast hurling. Fast hurling is about technique and no one epitomised that better than Offaly when they were in their pomp in the 1990's. An amalgam of unconscious first touch, crisp striking, ground hurling and an almost hypnotic ban on solo running used to create prairies of space for them to operate in. None of them were real speed merchants or had the stamina of middle-distance runners, but they were clinical in their decision making.

Yet in the midst of all that nostalgia, it's very easy to forget how effective Offaly were in the tight and how clinical they were when they neck-laced short passing movements together. No other team in the history of the game passed the ball backwards as much as they did to create the space. A good proportion of their scores came from plays like that.

"No matter what anyone says, I think it takes brain to play short ball and brawn to play long ball," says Bernie O'Connor. "I think people who go on about this quick fast ball into the forwards should come out of the fog. I think a lot of that is what they heard years ago. What's a fast ball? The fast ball more then often hits a fella's hurley and flies 40 yards out the field.

"If you're a wing-back and you have a good midfielder 20 yards outside you, why should you put the ball over his head and let him chase it? There are an awful lot of people out there with negative thinking to hurling. No-one else is prepared to try it, but this style can work anywhere once you have fellas who can hurl and who can run."

When it works, they can carve teams up with their pace but when it breaks down, possession hurling is predictable, boring and laborious and all those tags have been labelled to Newtown in the past. A lot of that negativity, however, is part of the old school. "Anytime a new team comes along with a new style of hurling, people get very defensive and critical of it at first," says former Clare manager Ger Loughnane, whose team changed hurling in the mid 1990's. "But if it's successful, people will copy it and I think it's very exciting for the game that a team is playing like this.

"I'm sure that people will look at this style and wonder if it can be brought onto inter-county level because hurling needs constant change and it badly needs a new injection. I'd love to see teams coming up with new styles, especially given the terrible state of hurling at the moment. Everyone goes on about traditional hurling but the time to really look at something new is when it's not traditional."

Newtown have brought their style to a refinement that isn't seen too often in the game and they deserve a lot of credit for that. At this stage their play is very instinctive and their pace and hurling ability is aligned with a cohesion and anticipation that has come from perfecting it on the training ground. So far, it has worked for them.

"Who can say which style of hurling is the best?" Loughnane wonders. "Because they are so successful, people are inclined to say that Kilkenny's is the best at the moment. But that doesn't mean that it is the best. It's up to every team and county to perfect their own style and to make it the most effective possible. Nobody can argue that that's not hurling.

"People were giving out about Clare in the 1990s but now Kilkenny are playing the same way as Clare did, that aggressive, relentless style of play. (Brian) Cody found out that's what Clare did and he copied it. Now, he put the Kilkenny skill with it, but you can see how effective it is."

Teams and managers will always alter and counter game-plans and like anything else, possession hurling is a style that can be counteracted when people cop onto it. Teams will learn to pin possession sides back into their own half by relentless mobile man-marking and packing midfield to stop the build-up.

The real test of Newtown will be when the heat comes on and their game is subjected to the highest scrutiny. Their style will have to stand the rest of time before it can be proved effective, but if they do win the All Ireland club championship, then it's likely to be copied.

Given the perilous state of hurling at present, there is a lot of merit in looking at the Newtown model. Hurling in most of the second-tier counties has regressed rather than progressed over the last decade, primarily because of the dominance of football. That's why incorporating the Newtown style could be crucial for the game in the long run.

"I think their style would be really suited in the traditional football counties, where they are used to a possession game," says Joey Carton, GAA Provincial Games Manager for Munster and one of the top coaches in the country. "Players would still need to have the basic skills but coaches could use something that their players are used to and it's definitely something that could be looked at."

A possession game is normally associated with negativity too but Newtown's hurling is attractive in it's own right. They don't operate a blanket defence or a screening system and they shoot on sight when they get near the scoring zone. Even though they haven't been scoring goals, this side is designed to raise green flags. Their other scoring statistics, however, don't lie. They scored a combined total of 32 points in the county final and Munster semi-final. In the Munster decider against Patrickswell, 2-16 of their 2-18 total came from play.

Their underage teams are coached to play using the same possession game and they have followed the model of defining a style for the whole club rather like Nemo Rangers. The present bunch of players have created a legacy and they want it replicated. "You have to hand it to them because they're after standing up against all the tradition in Cork and Munster," says Carton. "They've taken it to a new level and you can't say that Newtownshandrum's hurling isn't attractive to watch. Is there such a thing as the ideal coaching method for hurling? There's no such thing as the only in hurling."

It may only be in time that Newtownshandrum get the real credit that they deserved. In the meantime, they've more important things on their minds.

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