`What are you doing later? Have you got an hour to talk about football?" A grey-haired man in a suit accosts Brian Kerr, the Republic of Ireland Youths Team Manager, in Dublin's Montrose Hotel.
"Maybe half an hour," says Kerr to the man, with genuine good will.
"I think I was at school with him," he says, creasing his brow in an effort to remember. "I'm trying to imagine what he would have looked like 30 years ago."
Kerr leaves the man in the suit to wander around the bar with a hopeful expression on his face and spends two hours talking to me instead. But I have this feeling that as soon as I leave, the man is going to leap out from behind a potted plant and pin the patient and affable Kerr to the chair for the rest of the day.
"Football is fickle and people's opinions of football managers are fickle," Kerr declares, when asked about his sudden emergence into the light after Ireland came third in the youth world cup in Malaysia this summer. "I had a fair amount of success working within the league here but it wasn't until the international success of Malaysia that people started to say I was a good football manager." He describes the job as "a unique position": "The examinations come infrequently and are short. Those 90 or 95 minutes control how everybody sees your work in the months surrounding the game, and even then you've no control because you're not out on the field." Still, it can be "uniquely satisfying": "When it goes well the buzz you feel for the few hours after a game is very special."
The 44-year-old Kerr has a friendly, slightly interrogative expression, with warm brown eyes. Known as "the Greener" because of his habit of wearing his green Irish tracksuit top, he looks casually smart when we meet, in fawn trousers, blue shirt and woollen waistcoat. He smiles a lot when he talks and has a rare ability to stop a conversation to answer his mobile phone without seeming abrupt.
The phone talk is all about getting the under-18s players organised to play in this week's European qualifying tournament in Moldova: "Most of our players are in the English clubs and several will be playing first-team football on Saturday. Then they'll have to get a 7 a.m. flight on Sunday. Although the English clubs like the idea of their players in international matches, they'd prefer you to use the players only when they don't need them, like in the middle of the night." He is anxious about the hotel they'll be staying in: "Moldova isn't fantastic, facilities-wise, and we can't afford to bring a fridge." He recalls going to Romania during his 10-year stint as manager of St Pat's "after the end of Ceausescu's sad tale" in 1990: "We brought our own food on that trip." This sort of thorough-going concern for his players' welfare belies "the public perception of me as demanding and tough": "Some are into roaring and shouting, but I'm considerate of players' feelings. I have a gentle and emotional approach to their welfare. I'm emotional to the extent that it influences the way I pick players. You get hunches about the balance of the team - you have to run with your hunches."
He is "modest" about the unexpected success of the summer, putting it down to "a bit of luck along the way" as well as "good judgment in relation to the players we brought. We managed to produce a very special spirit in the team. The players were fantastic: intelligent, disciplined, technically very good." Their preparation time was only one week: "We made a conscious decision on how we were going to play. I didn't think we would do as well as we did." Kevin Kilbane, Ross Darcy and Alan Mahon were all injured, and Ian Harte and David Connolly were not available: "Mick McCarthy wouldn't let Harte and Connolly go because he needed them rested for the World Cup games. I can understand that and it has since been proved that they were very important in those games. We did go to Malaysia somewhat short of players but that sort of thing is always happening. What matters is that the guys that were there were excellent, and maybe other guys would not have been so good at the time. We only lost two matches: one to Ghana, and we corrected that in the play-off, and one to Argentina, who were the champions. It was fantastic."
It was an exhausting time for him: "I didn't get a lot of sleep - the heat and humidity were difficult and I was getting phone calls from journalists in the middle of the night because there is a seven-hour time difference. I was going to all the matches to see what the other teams were like, in case we were going to play them. I remember taking notes on Argentina, which came in very useful because we ended up playing them in the semi-finals."
He was pleased that the preconceptions about the Irish style of playing were reversed in Malaysia: "During Jack's time - and I don't want to underestimate the success he had - when I went to places and talked to people, outside all the `Ole Ole Ole' stuff after matches, they honestly didn't admire the way we played. So in Malaysia the foreign journalists were all expecting a big strong team playing direct, unsophisticated football. By the end they could see that wasn't the case. Anyway, our team was one of the smallest so it wouldn't have made sense to rely on physical strength. You have to be adaptable and play the system that suits your players best."
Kerr has great admiration for Liam Tuohy ("The Rasher"), whom Kerr worked with when Tuohy was youths manager between 1981 and 1985. During that time, the Irish youths reached three successive European Championship finals and one World Cup finals: "We had fair success at that time. It was a great education. Liam has been a big influence, helping me to be more confident about my own way of doing things and communicating better with people." Kerr resigned along with Tuohy after a row with Jack Charlton: "Jack came into the dressing-room during the home game against Iceland and started telling Liam's team how to play. For five years Liam had been telling them to pass the ball, and now Jack was telling them to play the long ball. Liam resigned on the way home, and myself and Noel O'Reilly went with him. I had no dealings with Jack after that. It's interesting now to see Mick McCarthy has re-introduced Liam's style."
He is dismissive of rumblings that he should take over from Mick McCarthy: "He's doing excellently. I don't see the idea of me replacing him as very logical. Generally anyone involved in the international team has lived and played in England, and has played for Ireland. Those are things I've never done. "When Mick McCarthy started, people were delighted with him. Then they were critical when he didn't get the results they expected. Now he has earned three good results in recent matches. He'll be a hero if we get to the World Cup."
Something of a hero for Kerr was his father, Frank Kerr, "one of the all-time great amateur boxers", who died when Kerr was only 15: "The family's first sport wasn't football, it was boxing. My two older brothers boxed a bit, one reasonably successfully. I was the youngest of five - I had two older sisters as well.
"I have vivid memories of going to the boxing with my father. He never told me anything; I just watched. I loved the excitement of the gym. He was a coach in Trinity and a founder of Drimnagh, Michael Carruth's boxing club. There were always loads of kids, and they had amazing discipline.
"I remember walking across the cobblestones in Trinity with him. There were people with strange accents, and I saw people playing squash for the first time in my life. It was the 1960s, and most of the Trinity students involved in the boxing were black fellows or Asian lads. There were no black people in Drimnagh where we lived, but we used to have black visitors from Trinity, very educated and cultured people."
For years Kerr felt lost in the shadow of his famous father, and it is for this reason he does not want to talk about his own children: "I don't want them to have to go through the same thing." Perhaps to differentiate himself from his father, Kerr played football rather than boxing and went cross-country running with his "best pal", Eamonn Coghlan, who lived across the road. "We both played for Rialto and ran for Celtic. At 15 we split. He stuck with the running; I stuck with the football. I think he got a bit more out of it than me." Kerr realised early that his playing talents would not stretch far enough to fulfil his ambition to play in England, "but I knew I was good at organising". He managed the under-12s for Crumlin United when he was playing for the under16s. When he was 20 Liam Tuohy took him on as manager of the under-18s for Shamrock Rovers: "People kept asking me to manage teams at a higher level than I could play myself." The only thing he won as a player was an FAI intermediate Cup medal with Bluebell United in 1982.
He kept playing "intermittently" until 1983: "What was frustrating about management was that you couldn't be out on the pitch yourself." Early on he perceived the role of manager as bearing a more significant responsibility: "When I was managing one club and playing for another, if there was a choice between which team I turned up for, I always turned up for the one I was managing. A team can always get another player, but the manager is the one who has to make the decisions, picking the players, finding out when the bus goes."
Kerr went to school at St Michael's CBS in Inchicore, and was an early supporter of St Patrick's Athletic team. When he was eight he went to his first match: St Pat's were beaten 8-2 by Cork Celtic. Even then, "I had visions of managing St Pat's". In 1986 his vision became a reality: "Out of loyalty I have often been manager of teams without much resources, like Pat's." He stayed 10 years: "I stayed and fought hard for the club to do well. I had a mission and I stuck to it."
When he took on the team, most of the players had resigned along with the previous manager. He had to assemble a new team on a shoestring: £7,000 in transfer fees. That team departed in 1990, forcing Kerr to start all over again, and there were other headaches, including a liquidation. Before his appointment, St Pat's hadn't won a league title since 1956. With Kerr at the helm, the club won twice in 10 years: in 1990 and again last year.
He still has a strong affection for Pat's, in spite of the many set-backs he struggled through: "There was a lot of frustration, a lot of scraps, and a lack of resources to get players. I was hurt by some of the FAI's decisions about us, which I felt were unfair. There just wasn't enough respect for Pat's, and this sometimes made the difference between us winning and losing trophies. I was very self-critical too. But in the end it went really well."
He has all sorts of ideas about the way league football should develop in Ireland, believing we should follow the Scandinavian example and go full-time, as a way of keeping the best young players at home. He admires the Dutch Ajax scheme, which includes education in the players' contracts. He adds: "Football is changing - you have to be much more aware of young players' eating habits, drug and alcohol abuse, and resting. It's only in the last few years that we have started to become aware of all that here."
He has a life outside football, just about. For 25 years he worked as a lab technician in UCD (he is now on a career break). He likes music - including B.B. King and Phil Lynott - and theatre, but "if there is one thing I'm obsessional about apart from football, it's reading newspapers. I'm interested in politics and current affairs. I sometimes stay up until 1 a.m. so I can read the paper. I haven't got the concentration to read books. I'm too jumpy. I prefer the length of newspaper articles."
He usually votes Labour, but he is not a member of any political party: "My father was anti-politics, probably because of coming from Belfast, and all the bitterness in the North. But he knew what was right and what was wrong; he saw the injustice of well-off people strokehauling. I'm like him, I have great feeling for the underdog, and I believe that everyone should have the same opportunity to lead a decent life."
This same inclusive vision informs his exhaustive match-attendance, always on the look out for new talent, whether in Donegal or Wexford: "I think one of the reasons the FAI picked me for this job is that I know the people who are working in the game at all different levels. Just in the last four days I've seen 10 matches. If we get one jewel out of all that, it's worth it. It really helps if you can see players in lots of league games. Aidan Lynch didn't do well in the trials but I knew he was good because I had seen him in so many league games.
"I'd like everyone around the country who's working in football in Ireland - whether it's training kids or washing gear - to feel they have a link into the international team. I identify with all that stuff. I've spent years scrapping with kids, marking pitches, hanging up nets - I consider myself very lucky to have ended up managing the Irish international team at any level."
