Ian O'Riordan talks to former Kerry players Eoin Liston and Liam Flaherty who assess the managerial styles of Mick O'Dwyer and Páidí Ó Sé.

The glittering careers of Mick O'Dwyer and Páidí Ó Sé cross paths decisively - and perhaps finally - in Thurles today when Kildare and Kerry clash.

What they've shared in Kerry football down through the years is what Brendan Kennelly has described as the eternal things: style, courage, determination, speed, cunning, complacency, waste, recklessness, the ability to work, intelligence, victory, defeat, renewal.

What they'll share on the sidelines of Thurles this evening is the religious intensity and obsession that now isolates them as managers. As much as they have been team players down the years, it has been their individualism that has also set them apart.

On Mick O'Dwyer the individual, Eoin Liston has much to recall. During four years teaching in Waterville, Liston came under the influence of O'Dwyer like no other Kerry player. Ask him what sets O'Dwyer apart and Liston doesn't need to think twice. "It was like judging racehorses. He knew when players were peaking and he knew how to keep them at that peak. And that meant he would have different sort of training regimes for different players so he could keep players at their peak.

"From that he got total respect from the players. Also he had such fierce passion about the game. He was totally consumed by it. And that would rub off on the players."

On Páidí Ó Sé the individual, take the qualified view of Liam Flaherty. He was already well established in the Kerry team when Ó Sé came in as manager, and was there too when Ó Sé took them to the All-Ireland title in 1997.

"To me it was his commitment. To all the players. He treated them all like his own sons. He used be phoning players up, say, on the Friday if we had a game on the Sunday, making sure everything was okay in their heads, and that there were no problems, say at work or wherever.

"He would go through all that with every player. And that was always appreciated. It was something different and new from previous managers, sort of his own way of doing it."

As O'Dwyer helped transform Liston into the Bomber, winner of seven All-Irelands, something more was revealed. O'Dwyer never thought about personal glory, only getting the best from his team. The same now with Kildare.

"Absolutely," says Liston. "We would almost feel embarrassed if we didn't perform really because we knew what he'd put in. He just had that total focus, and I would have nothing but the highest respect for the man.

"And he had me training like a full-time athlete there at one stage. Because any nights I wasn't training with Kerry, then I'd go out with him and he'd give it to me twice as hard as he would with Kerry.

"He used take me on these runs. Extra runs let's call them. But in fairness it was the only way I would have got to the level of fitness required. And if I hadn't done it with him I probably never would have got there."

In that quest for Kerry glory, no player had any guarantees. "He would always put out what he considered the best team," says Liston, "regardless of his relationship with the players. The county always came first.

"And if he had any problem or any row with a player, that would always be forgotten for the sake of the county. And that worked both ways in that he was absolutely ruthless in his pursuit of glory."

Of the two individuals, O'Dwyer would be more revolutionary. Liston points towards his ground-breaking approach of the 1970s, when O'Dwyer sometimes had his players training against the grain.

"I'd say himself and Kevin Heffernan were the two great revolutionaries of Gaelic football. He was smart enough, football-wise, to see the level of fitness that could be attained, something like Heffernan had done. He went out to try and outdo that.

"Pat Spillane said something recently about O'Dwyer's tactics fitting on the back of a stamp. I think that was said with tongue in cheek. I would always have considered Micko a very good tactician. I mean, he developed a style of play for our team anyway and stuck with it. And it proved very successful over time."

And so the list goes on. His passion, his roguery. His handling of the media, and making sure he would protect his players, even if that meant taking on a lot himself.

Even the sensational defeat to Offaly in the 1982 final cast no doubts over O'Dwyer's approach. "Well, he's certainly not a quitter," says Liston. "And I don't think he has any faults. But I mean who am I to judge God?"

Flaherty also struggles to uncover a crack in Ó Sé's approach. It was meticulous from start to finish. No stone was left unturned. Defeat was never an option.

"You know when I was there with him we didn't lose too many games," says Flaherty. "But I do remember coming down after the semi-final with Kildare in 1998, sitting on the train only a couple of seats away from Páidí.

"There was just this blank expression on his face. And he didn't speak to any of the players, or anyone else. It was like defeat never came into his vocabulary. I never heard him mention the word loss, or the word defeat. It's like he finds it very hard to accept defeat.

"That's just his attitude, and something that always clicked with me. The few times we did lose, say against Mayo in 1996 and Kildare in 1998, Páidí always found it hard. He would never mix with the players after a day like that. He would just sit there, staring into blank space. And playing the game over and over in his head. And the mistakes we made."

When he emerges from underneath Semple Stadium this evening, don't expect Ó Sé to be breathing fire. The motivation, says Flaherty, is a slow brew: "No, it wasn't all in one day or one sitting. It would be built up.

"Say for the All-Ireland final of 1997, the motivation would have started straight after the semi-final. And he's very good at going through videos of games and pointing out the strengths of the opposition, or the mistakes our own players were making.

"And there was a lot of tactics in his methods of training, but we never really counted that as tactics. We just concentrated on what he told us to do on the playing field, and he sort of smoothed it into the training, without spelling it out as a special tactic. He does things that way.

"But every manager has got his own ways of bringing on a player. With Páidí it was definitely the individual attention, and ringing up players a couple of days before the game and going through a few points about their own game. And pointing out things that we might have forgotten about ourselves coming up to a big game.

"We'd have enough things going on in our heads, but he'd point out two or three things and would tell us to mull it over in our heads a couple of times. And rectify it. Then, if it went wrong on the field, we would correct it almost automatically."