THE cult of the manager is a dangerous thing, but in Inchicore Brian Kerr is as close to deification as makes no difference. And rightly so. To bridge a 34 year gap with the unfashionable Saints could be dismissed as a one off, but to take them to the Holy Grail again six years later is astonishing. Hail the King. Hail the Messiah.
In addition to the club's fifths League title, Kerr has also guided, St Patrick's Athletic to this afternoon's eagerly anticipated FAI Harp Cup final at Lansdowne Road with Shelbourne. They are within one game of their first Cup since 1961, and their first double ever.
On the surface it might not seem that extraordinary. Derry City did it in 1989 after all, and Dundalk in 1988, while Shamrock Rovers did the double in three consecutive seasons, 1985 to 1987 inclusive. But whereas Rovers had inherent advantages, St Patrick's have inherent disadvantages.
Kerr's achievement is little short of phenomenal. He inherited an ultra defensive, mid table side in December 1986 which departed en bloc the following summer. He built a new, young team for a cost of £7,000 in transfer fees and came within a goal of winning the 87-88 League. They won the 89-90 Championship, and then that squad pretty much departed en bloc.
Since then, there have been three changes of ownership, a liquidation three summers ago, and a couple of years in the bottom six of that awful top six, bottom six league system. Yet Kerr, painstakingly, built another best team in the country.
Of course, many others have contributed. No one man, even a Messianic manager, makes a football club. Indeed, if the last decade in the club's troubled history proves anything, it is that a manager and his team, to an extent, can only be as good as their support structures allow them to be.
There are many heroes within this club, now finally at peace with itself after years of in fighting and blood letting. Loyal servants like Phil O'Callaghan, the ever optimistic programme editor, and former chairman, through good and bad times, Phil Mooney, a gentleman in this often seedy game.
Then there is the current chairman and chief benefactor Tim O'Flaherty, not one for seeking public acclaim, though he deserves it. Then of course, there's Pat Dolan, who bestrides Richmond Park like Orson Welles.
Forced into retirement through injury at 27, Dolan is more than a 24 hour a day chief executive. He's a dreamer and a visionary. What's more, he's fulfilling what once seemed preposterous dreams. The St Patrick's family tree has branched out, embracing Inchicore and beyond.
Their fans are from every agegroup, they've bought replica shirts by the thousands, they sing non stop and they illuminate grounds with more than their flares and fireworks.
Kerr always had the knack of assembling good back up staff. Where before he had the likes of Billy Bagster and Paul Nugent, he now has Noel O'Reilly, Liam Buckley and Cyril Farrell. But throughout the last decade, only one thing has remained constant: Brian Kerr as driving force.
Whem mimicked ("Jayzus, we battered them"), it's as much the little man's competitive that's off as his accent. A St Patrick's bantamweight fighting against the world. Though he has had a more varied coaching career than is generally realised, it somehow seems as if he was born to be the St Patrick's manager. Maybe it was his destiny.
Son of the late Frank Kerr, renowned champion boxer and later coach at Trinity, he went to school across the road from Richmond Park at St Michael's. He remembers his first game at Richer, as an eight year old Cork Celtic whupped them 8-2.
An old Cork based friend who had been at that game also rang him during the week and reminded him that St Patrick's won a Cup tie, 1-0, seven days later with the same team. Kerr corrected him Dinny Lowry had missed the Celtic match. Typical.
Even then he had visions of managing St Patrick's. "I was a very handy schools player (at Rialto), after that I went for trials with Pat's when I was 15-16. Damien Richardson's father, actually, had me down for trials, but I didn't like it and I signed for Shelbourne and played a year in their `B' team."
Not long afterwards, Liam Tuohy invited him to manage the Rovers `B' team when he was 19.
At 15, he had managed the Crumlin United under 12s. "I realised very quickly that I was good at getting other guys to play. Perhaps that was as a result of being frustrated at the way played myself."
He cut his managerial teeth with the Irish Technical Schools' team, managed the Shelbourne `B' team, was trainer to the Irish Youths team under Tuohy (which reached three European finals and one World finals), and also teamed up with his other main mentor, Mick Lawlor, first at Home Farm and then Drogheda.
He turned down St Patrick's in 84, but didn't when they called again in 86 after Jimmy Jackson resigned. "I felt that the opportunity wasn't going to come again for me and I suppose, in my heart, I wanted a go at it.
He quickly detected his new players were wary of him. "Most of them didn't fancy me because they didn't know me. The team talk before the first match wasn't as important as the one at half time. St Patrick's had been playing 5-3-2, with Padraig O'Connor sweeping behind James Coll and John Cleary, and Eamonn Gregg and Austin Brady at full back.
"I picked the same team, but at halftime I said this was the last time we're playing like this. We're playing with four at the back and John Cleary can go up front and the full backs come around. I remember Austin Brady looking at me like is this Chinese?'. And I said: `Padraig you come up and play beside James because he used to play beside the effing goalkeeper'. It suited him, he was cute. Padraig was really the leader."
That they all left, he now admits, was no bad thing. He assembled his own team. Dave Henderson, John McDonnell and Maurice O'Driscoll arrived from Drogheda, Curtis Fleming from Belvedere, Damien Byrne from Rovers. Then there was Pat Kelch, Mick Moody, John Tracey and Mark Ennis. Most of them were unheard of. Paul Osam and Pat Fenlon came through the `B' team - no one uses his reserves better than Kerr and Joe Lawless and Tony O'Connor were the final pieces in his new jigsaw.
The 89-90 League winners had no playing link with the team he inherited. "I didn't think the team fulfilled its potential. They were still very young, only Damien has retired, and with the addition of a couple of players each season they could have been as dominant as Rovers were in the right structure.
"But I look back on them with pride and the way it was done on a very tight ship, and a very small wage bill. The camaraderie of it will probably never be matched again Billy (Bagster) was part of it, Paul Nugent was part of it because it was new for them all. None of them had ever won medals anywhere and that was special.
Ironically, only Osam (with Rovers and now St Patrick's again) has won a league medal since. But their legacy, ultimately, was a new pitch and a return to Richmond Park from Harold's Cross. That dream the return to Richmond Park - fuelled Kerr's loyalty through the grim times. He rejected overtures from Drogheda.
"The spells in the summer when players were going were hard to take the dishonesty of some of them, the deviousness of other clubs hurt me, which is maybe stupid. Going round trying to convince people that things were alright and in the background I knew it was in turmoil. The summer of 93 was crazy.
"There was a time when I wondered should somebody else be doing it, fighting corners for everybody, fighting with old shareholders from 1965, asking them would they release their shares to let us start again. Pushing people into doing things in case it falls apart, ringing League presidents and asking them to act quickly because we might collapse and not getting a great response.
"Not getting paid pissed me off and then ending up going to liquidation meetings and the company getting wound up. You know you've broken your arse in a fairly professional way for a long time and sometimes you wondered were you stupid and sometimes I do wonder am I still stupid."
But it has its rewards. "As Steve Coppell once said, for two or three hours after a match there's no other job that compares to it when you get it right and the team played right.
"Right now there's total contentment about the end product the development of the team and seeing a little bit of respect coming from everyone for the club. We've won the League and we've won it in considerable style."
It's the reward for hard work. No manager sees more games. No manager has a greater in depth knowledge of other players and other teams. He seems to know every team that ever played - which only partly explains why he never loses a football argument.
Most of all, he's thorough. "I am about football and yet I'm not about other things in life. I mean, at the moment my car mightn't be taxed, my insurance could be up, the wheels could be falling off. There's a noise off it for six months and I haven't brought it to the garage. It's getting worse every day. But football gives me the best pleasure. I know it's the thing I'm good at."
He has an elephant like memory. He's very shrewd and plans a seasonal campaign with precision. His passion for the game is unrelenting. He lives a game, and while other managers can cast it aside quickly, he lives with a defeat or a win for the next week. He's a football man, and he's a Dub. If he calls you `rasher', you're well in with him.
Few get the better of him. He's feisty and argumentative. Ask him what angers him. Ask him what he would like to change.
"The administration of the League and the FAI. I'd put some one in as chief executive with power, to make decisions whether people like them or not for the good of the game. Decisions that would be good business decisions, but also fair to the teams, to anyone that wants to make a bit of progress.
"I don't really get angry. I give out about people who are ill informed, when they try and dictate things to other clubs and they're not well informed. Some of the decisions that were made in the League, most of them were quite good - but some of them were bad decisions. The last one there, about a 22 game League was infuriating. It was so stupid - and the bottom six, top six came from the same source. In the last few years, there wasn't an awful lot wrong with the 33 game format. It's not ideal, but it's the best we have with the numbers we have.
"There was the three points that were taken off Cork for fielding two ineligible players. They weren't given to UCD and UCD weren't given the chance to play for them again. So what was the point of the thing? We took the points off Cork and said you were bold'. But the team who did everything right still lost the match.
"It would be like some week we're playing Shelbourne and sign David Platt, Branco and Juninho, and we win three or 4-0 and somebody takes the points off us. But for Shels, that's tough, they happened to play us that week. An administration that comes up with decisions like that is not capable of giving the leadership which the game needs. There's not enough imagination."
No, as you can see, he does not get angry.
If it's true that a team reflects its manager, and it usually does, then this St Patrick's team reflects well on him. Gritty, full of heart, well organised, pragmatic, yet not without flair when the occasion demands.
In the incestuous, wonderful world of Irish soccer, he's one of the best, one of the greats. Hail the King.
