You hear him coming long before you see him, the all too imitable voice rasping through the corridors of Thorp Arch. "See you in 10 minutes. I'll have that for you later. How are you doing? I'm just nipping in here for an interview. Come and see me this afternoon will ya?"

And he strides into the room, moviestar tanned above his yellow sweatshirt and gangly in his blue shorts on this wet day. He collapses himself into a black leather office chair and rubs his neck gingerly. The calendar on the wall behind him says that David O'Leary has just one match left this season. Leicester City. Saturday. Reminds him. He has to go and talk to the guy who does the programme. One last column to sort.

He wants a rest. A long sleep. A break at home in Dublin. Some golf. Some family time. He's jaded now and the butt end of this epic season seems to be limping by. He wants to recharge.

It's been a hard drag this, 11 months, almost a year of living by the laws of serendipity, and happenstance, trying to tack a course through suspensions, court cases, controversies and injuries with only the charts from a couple of prior voyages to work with. Calamity stacked upon calamity and yet . . .

It comes down to this last weekend, a traditional old fashioned football Saturday when the cards are thrown in the air at three, only to land on the floor in time for the jaunty music to Sports Report. One last game against Leicester and if Leeds win and Liverpool fail to do so it all begins anew in August. He's tired, knackered tired but he wants for nothing more. Bring it all on again.

Leeds could be mid-table now with O'Leary sitting handily in a nest of excuses. On top of the stresses which football and football players brought him, his Dad, Christy, was ill with ticker trouble for a couple of months this season. O'Leary spent long hours in the air between Leeds and Dublin, as long again on the phone to Hugh McCann in the Mater.

"They were brilliant to him but you want to know the longest eight hours of my life? The day when he got operated on. It was the Friday before a Sunday game, and everything seemed to be on top of each other, he's coming through good now, but that's the private side to a hell of a season, one very tiring demanding season. Mentally, I feel very tired."

There's only bread and butter left. Home to Leicester but so much of next season's shape will be decided this afternoon. The adventure part of this year, O'Leary's Quixotic romp across Europe with his babies tilting at the windmills in football's leading nation states, ended, of course, under an inky Spanish sky 11 days ago. The tastes still linger.

"Getting that far, going to the edge in the Champions League, I loved and relished it. Last week in Valencia, the pressure. Fantastic. Without that pressure I'd get bored. I would just get bored otherwise. I need pressure.

"Standing in that Stadium and feeling the edge, I loved that. That's what it's about for us. I never feel nervous on those occasions. Just excited."

There's a trace of sourness in the memory too. UEFA's decision to ban Lee Bowyer may not have been unreasonable given the offence but the lateness of the announcement hurt Leeds. Dave O'Leary has a folksy way of talking things through which makes you wonder how he gets the respect from millionaires who are barely shaving. He hardens up when you mention Bowyer though.

"We've had no luck all season and still got to the Champions League semi-final. We've been fighting things all season and nothing seems to have gone for us. Lee Bowyer. Things like that have been thrown in our face. No explanation for that whatsoever from UEFA. They lobbed it in on us the afternoon before the game. We got a fax, the chairman told me, I had to go and tell Lee. Look at the guy from Bayern the following night, let's see what happens there or Martin Keown's situation. We'll see is it one rule for powerful clubs, another rule for everyone else. It certainly hurt us on the night in Valencia."

Does he need this? When football finished for him he could have gone into TV with Gary and Des and Alan, all good friends of his. He could see the cushy life stretching before him. Make-up girls and chirpy production assistants and good jokes in the studio. Nice meals and ample golf.

He decided he needed to be extended, to be put under pressure, to be forced outside the comfort zone. He's always been interested in himself that way. Could he do it? If he was pushed could he do it?

So in Italy 11 years ago, against Romania when everyone was dead on their feet and the enormity of it was unavoidable, it was he who organised the penalty takers and he who took the vital kick.

SO three years ago when Leeds United's Emerald Air Flight landed in flames on the ground at Stanstead and bounced four or five times before skidding to a halt, it was O'Leary who bust open the emergency door and ushered people out as the starboard engine burned. "I did what anyone would do," he says now, as if the option of howling like a baby and screaming "we're all going to die," wasn't on the menu that night.

"Well I can't say I thought I was going to die. I was told afterwards we should have. Nine times out of 10 we were history but I believe what will be will be and the great man didn't require my presence that night."

He's so matter of fact that you have to think for a minute to realise he's not talking about Alex Ferguson.

O'Leary talks about the Stanstead crash, the team coming home from a walloping at West Ham and it's clear he's put it away in some recess. It didn't really galvanise people because, this is football and people move on. It was just part of his odd life, he lives like an accountant, he's a man who brings home chinese or Indian food to the family on match nights, who doesn't talk about his job at home and plays a little golf on Sunday. Except when he goes to work he walks the tightrope across the grand canyon.

This year has been a tough walk. His young squad almost sundered by a court case, beaten up by Barcelona, diminished by injuries and at one stage tucked firmly into the bottom half of the table. O'Leary splurged a record amount for a defender, bought a striker from Milan, went further in the Champions League than Arsene Wenger or Alex Ferguson and plays for a return ticket this afternoon.

"That's what it's about. This tension. I always want to see can I do things. Test myself. I like that. I have to be tested. Have to keep going. No small clubs. You have to try and manage as big as you can. I never settle for an easy life. I need that edge."

If he wanted testing, well the great man sent him a combat-course's worth this season. You can't help noticing as you drive into Leeds' rural training centre that a large prison with great licks of barbed wire on top sits right across the road. It has to have featured in a few nightmares and a few dark jokes.

By not ending at all, the trial of four of O'Leary's players ended in the worst possible way as regards the running of a football club, an outcome he describes as probably the lowest point of his season.

What had impressed about O'Leary this year, however, was the fact that Leeds' current run of league form began when the trial was unfolding. O'Leary plays it down totally. Football is simple cause and effect.

"Yeah. People jumped on the bandwagon at the time. They are so fickle, they change like the weather. It's a rollercoaster but I knew that and first I never doubted myself. Regardless of what else was going on, I knew I had eight players injured. All eight of them came back and we started getting results again. No tactical genius there. There's been loads of decisions alright and you never get them all right. I don't regret them and there's lots I still can't talk about but at the end of the season, looking back, what do we need? More players. We have to get a bigger squad. Simple."

HIS only comment on the trial business concerns the reintegration of Mike Duberry, whose return to the flock has been smooth. "Nothing to handle with Michael. He gets on with everyone here. The problem was what people outside think and within this place that's not a problem. "All he did was tell the truth. That's what you have to do. That's what we wanted him to do. At the end of the day he had to do what was right, that was all the club can ask.

"There was never a murmur from the players, he's very popular and I think it'll stay that way."

Regardless of the eventual outcome for Woodgate and Bowyer, one gets the impression that no part of the tales of vodka-swilling within the Majestyk nightclub earlier on during that evening held any charm for O'Leary.

When he goes shopping this summer he knows precisely what he wants. People first, players second.

"I'm looking at next year and I'm looking at character first. No bad apples. I want good people. I won't tolerate some of the things you hear about in this game. I'm not going to buy ready-made saints or make them into saints but I'll be talking to them about being in the public eye, how there's always a scandal waiting.

"They have to choose the company they mix with, that means looking after themselves, avoiding drink. The drinking culture is starting to go but still not gone out of this game.

"The rewards are immense and they can't have it both ways. You expect players to look after themselves. If they don't they are mad. To stay in this game just another two or three years . . . there's so much reward.

"The culture is that to have a good time you have to get well and truly pissed. I don't agree with that. I never did it as a player myself. I like a few pints of stout in the local when I go home but I don't think you need to get totally whatever. You are athletes now earning lots of money. If you're doing that you won't be in the game long enough, the game just passes you by, you get injuries, you don't get over injuries, you think oh, I can do it. I can train tomorrow, but in the end it catches up, it shows on the pitch.

"We know by their performances."

Arriving at Thorp Arch just as the senior team are finishing training, you notice a couple of things. The focused stillness of the place and the fact that major stars are lifting goalposts and gathering traffic cones and flags etc. O'Leary runs a democracy here.

"Millionaire footballers all have their own little moods, the new generation take criticism personally, no matter how constructive it is. I have a good bunch but in general, modern players, they take it personally.

"They have so much money and they are so pampered and have so many people whispering to them. They are more confident than I was when I was a young fella. You have to gain their respect. I fine people if necessary but if I have to fine them twice, well it's lack of respect to me. I don't double the fine, I get rid of them. It's respect not fear that you want."

Not that O'Leary ever cringed or cowered around the marble halls at Arsenal, it was just a different time. Life in digs, training, cleaning boots and sweeping terraces all week and Saturday evenings eating in the Chinese at Oakwood Station, getting back in time for Match of the Day. His cockiness began and ended on the football pitch.

Everything else was diffidence.

Oddly for a football man, his life is full of certainties. Always has been. His childhood was street football and Shelbourne and Sunday's playing in Strand Street off Capel Street with his Uncle, his Dad and his brother Pierce.

As a 15-year-old kid he went to Arsenal. That was 28 years ago on May 2nd and when he made the first team, making his debut against Burnley, he just stayed there. Seventeen years old and possessed of a gazelle's pace. Nobody will ever play 558 top-flight league games for one club again.

At 18 he made his Irish debut at Wembley. He won 67 caps and moved smoothly into management at a huge Premiership club under a benign chairman. He plans to finish out with 40 years service to the game. In at 15 out at 55, which gives him 12 more years.

"I see myself at 55 finishing in football. Twelve years of hard work giving it my best. You can't say where you'll be then or what you'll do. I love my country, before they bury me there I'd like to live there. Hopefully, the next 12 years take me to good places.

"That part of my life that managers speak about, getting sacked, it holds no fears for me. What are the worst things that can happen in life? Nobody dies. I have the best chairman in football, I'm here because he is here. I have a great relationship. It would hurt him to sack me. It would hurt me to leave him.

"I hope we remain friends until we both die. Have great respect for him. I like him very much as a person.

"It's being a failure would hurt me. Not the sack."

HE has played the management game this season at surprisingly subtle levels, having little pokes and psychological jabs at rivals; Brian Kidd popped up as first-team coach when United were due to visit, the Arsenal way of doing things was "sadly changed" when Leeds were about to visit Highbury.

Careless words from a succession of European managers were grist to his mill when it came to motivating his players. Yet there is an odd fraternality about him when he speaks of managers.

Mick McCarthy is a case in point. Despite a mutual friendship with Packie Bonner, McCarthy and O'Leary have never exchanged Christmas cards, yet recently they have been glowing about each other.

"First," says O'Leary "I think that perception is wrong. With Mick, well myself and himself weren't buddy friends within the Irish team but we got on. We never went out socially but I didn't feel either of us had to build bridges. And dealing with him, he's first class.

"I have to look after myself and my players. I'm aware it's my country but I have a responsibility to the chairman. I can speak to Mick, get a point across. He understands what is needed, what's going on.

"What I want for them to do now is qualify for the World Cup. I think they have a great chance and Mick's done a wonderful job."

And McCarthy's job someday?

"Of course. For a boy from Dublin that would be the icing."

He'll never get over the boy from Dublin thing. It's as if he measures himself from a point starting in Hillcrest, Glasnevin. When is this going in the paper he asks at one stage. "Great," he says when told, "I must ring me Mam and Dad."

He has the use of a private jet now. He whistle-stopped to Milan in it last Friday. Next month he's going to Tulsa with his friend Lee Westwood for the US Open. He has a five-year contract here, a happy life with scarcely a ripple in it but . . .

"Listen," he says, "I grew up in a one-bedroom flat in Bluebell, then moved to Glasnevin when we were young still and me Mam and Dad still live in the same house. I have a great Mam and Dad, a great brother and sister.

"All still alive.

"Only one bad thing has happened to me, my grandmother Emily died.

"I was brought up right, proud of where I've come from. I just try to be a success in my own career and at some point I hope I can say: `I'm just a lad from Dublin but I haven't done bad'."

The journey is still in progress.