Keith Dugganprofiles Cork's long-serving midfielder and current All Star, Nicholas Murphy.

Nicholas Murphy is the only Cork player from the 1999 team that reached the All-Ireland final to start in tomorrow's showpiece. He would have had company in Anthony Lynch but for the wretched hand injury suffered by the Bantry man at training last weekend. But through years of great flux and turmoil in Cork football, Murphy has been an alkaline presence, calm and reliable and, it seems, always there.

"Other than the few times that he has been recovering from injuries, Nicholas has been a regular on the Cork team since 1999," says Jim Forbes, the former Cork chairman who has studied Murphy's game since his boyhood days in Carrigaline.

"He has been incredibly consistent in terms of selection through all that time and they have tried him at wing forward and centre forward and even in at full forward, but I think midfield is his most natural position and I think he has become among the leading midfielders in the country."

That is unquestionable. In fact, a strong performance from Murphy in tomorrow's September derby would make him a dark fancy for the footballer-of-the-year accolade.

Since returning to management, Billy Morgan has sung the praises of the tall midfielder regularly. It was a habit of Morgan to lament that whatever Murphy did on the field didn't seem enough to persuade the knights of the All Star table of his worth.

After Cork beat Sligo this year, it seemed as if the Cork manager was about to voice the same complaint, checking himself when he remembered that Murphy had, if fact, made the ceremonial team last November. It was arguably overdue.

He was genuinely eye-catching last summer. He alone saved the Cork-Donegal game quarter-final from the realms of utter mediocrity. The match was cautious and error-strewn and inexplicably lifeless, but through it all Murphy made a series of tremendous aerial fetches, including one spectacular claim when he took the football with one hand.

More crucially, in what was the definitive set-piece of the afternoon, Murphy posted himself on the edge of the Donegal square to contest a long Cork free with the scores tied and the match entering the final minute.

Although everyone in the stadium knew the ball would be directed at Murphy's gangly frame, no Donegal player could prevent him from catching it. With defenders collapsing around him, he slipped a clever pass to Ger Spillane and the centre back with the flair for the dramatic coolly clipped the winning point. Cork were back in the semi-final - against Kerry.

The frequency with which these huge southern rivals have been pitted together since the advent of the qualifying system has become one of its most obvious shortcomings. If there has ever been a thorn in the side of Kerry football, then it could well be identified as Billy Morgan, and as he spoke of meeting Kerry for the third time in the summer of 2006, the Nemo Rangers legend confessed he had had a premonition it would end like this.

And although he did not say it, he probably knew in his bones it would be impossible to overcome Kerry again. So it proved and in the early stages of the match, Nicholas Murphy's ability to compete was severely compromised after Darragh Ó Sé came crashing through him as he tried to claim a high ball. As John O'Keeffe put it in this newspaper, the brawny Gaeltacht man "horsed Nicholas Murphy out of it".

The Corkman remained on the field, but he was a subdued figure.

"Anyone who has played midfield knows that the worst belt you can get is in the lower back," says Cork selector Colman Corrigan.

"And in fairness to Darragh, you can get that so easily when your opponent is rising. And sure that kind of paralysed Nicholas in terms of his ability to jump in that game. I think going back to Munster finals down the years, Nicholas has continually broken more than even with Darragh. Last year, to be fair, you would have to say that Darragh came out on top in Croke Park. But we have to deal with every situation that a-rises.

"And we also have to have protection from the referee and some of the Kerry tackles - not all, because I wouldn't put Kerry in that mould, but some - that went in on Nicholas - not alone from Darragh but from others - were very close to the edge in terms of fouling. And we did not get the protection that day. But having said that all that, Nicholas is at the stage in his career - he was an All Star last year and has been very strong this year - where he is capable of dealing with those kind of tackles."

As Ó Sé has matured into the best midfielder of his era, Murphy has doggedly and quietly proven himself as the man best able to keep company with him. Both men have demonstrated their best form in the last three years. While Ó Sé was always capable of making awesomely powerful midfield fetches, he has become a massive onfield presence and occasionally displays a sweet and accurate shooting touch - it will be no great surprise if he lands a key point or two in tomorrow's derby.

When Ó Sé contests at midfield, though, he has the physical strength to scatter all before him. Murphy has a different style and often seems to ghost through the mass of bodies and come down with the ball. His jumping style is graceful and clean, the big frame elongated so that when he does make catches, they generally look spectacular.

"Nicholas is about six-foot-four and you never see him using the elbow or another guy's shoulder to get himself in the air," agrees Corrigan.

"He comes from about 20 yards back and he is never looking at opponents or even other team-mates; he's concentrating completely on the ball in the air. And when someone is doing that and another player is coming in from the side, it is very easy to get hit from the side."

It was Corrigan who noted with some despair after the team had lost to Fermanagh in the 2004 All-Ireland qualifiers that Cork were "light years" behind the northern teams. That match was unquestionably the turning point in Billy Morgan's most recent tenure and their ascent from that day, when they looked like a lost team, has been astonishing.

To make it back to an All-Ireland final just three championships later says it all. After that match, Murphy went back playing hurling and football with his club and an impressive run earned him a call up to the Cork intermediate hurling team for that year's All-Ireland final. He has always been a knacky big fella in the Kevin Hennessy mould and when, he got a run with 15 minutes left, he scored two crucial points.

Murphy had been good enough to play for the Cork U-21 team and given the Rebel hurlers were about to deliver two All-Irelands in a row, he must have wondered if he would have been better trying to make it as a hurler.

"I think he was equally good at hurling as he was at football and if he had devoted himself to it, then yeah, he might well be on the Cork senior team by now," reckons Jim Forbes.

"He is tall and he brought a lot of options to a hurling forward line. But football was really his game and I remember he stood out as early as national school. He always looked set to go places and two years at minor level, four years at U-21 for Cork and then he became the first player from Carrigaline to play senior championship football for Cork. He was deeply involved in the beginning."

In all those minor and U-21 years, Murphy won nothing so the hurling championship must have been a welcome relief. But Corrigan reckons that 2004 was when he decided to really knuckle down in terms of where he wanted to be as a footballer. The Cork squad thought long and hard about the lessons from that Fermanagh match. At their best, they could play irresistible football but at other times, they looked lightweight and clueless. Together, they set about rectifying that.

In a strange way, their most impressive hour of this summer was their one defeat, the narrow Munster final loss to Kerry in Killarney. There was a moment, 15 minutes into the second half when the visitors trailed by five points. It would have been easy for Cork to quit. Instead, they finished the stronger team and could have plundered a winning goal at the end. Through it all, Murphy's industry and contribution never flagged.

"If you look at Nicholas's performances over the past couple of years, he has certainly got way fitter, as the whole county team has," Corrigan says. "That is because the weights programme we brought in a few years ago is beginning to show benefits now.

"And I think quite a few of the Cork team realised that we had to get as fit as the Northern teams were and as physically strong as the Northern teams were which would, in turn, bring in their concentration and focus.

"Because if you look at Nicholas - and I think this applied to the team then - we were capable of playing superb football for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour but then we lost concentration and teams came back at us. So Nicholas has added a ferocious level of fitness and strength to his game where he is now getting forward and scoring a couple of points and making scores but more importantly, his defensive side is huge.

"As well as that, in the midfield area where you normally have big strong fetching men being knocked out of it in the air, well that doesn't happen any more. It is very hard to knock Nicholas Murphy in the air now over the past couple of years."

The big sky joust between Murphy and Ó Sé will be one chief sub-plot of tomorrow's final. Ó Sé has become a gigantic figure on the football landscape of the Kingdom, an old fashioned hero who plays it straight. And in what may be his final outing as a Kerry footballer, Ó Sé could not have asked for a more perfect opponent.

For in his own quiet way, Murphy has come to symbolise who and what this Cork team is. Cork football faded badly after the half-forgotten final of 1999 and has risen almost without trace under Billy Morgan, never as feted as the county hurling team and even this year slow to earn the plaudits from the television pundits and the former football men who put their names to newspaper columns.

And yet they are a game away from being champions. Through thick and thin, Nicholas Murphy has strived to better himself and while he is hardly one of the most recognisable faces or voices in the modern cast of Gaelic football players, he has established himself as one of the best.