JAMES KAVANAGH IN FULL BLOOM:Kildare's James Kavanagh has gone from bit-part to prime-time under Kieran McGeeney but he tells MALACHY CLERKINthe target now is a Leinster title

IT WAS only about three weeks ago that James Kavanagh properly joined the dots in his head. As a member of the Garda Síochána, he knew the Queen’s visit would make for a working week that pulled at every end of him. As a member of the Kildare football panel, he knew the week ending May 22nd would be the first serious knuckle-down of the summer. What he hadn’t quite copped until then was that they were turning out to be one and the same. Uh-oh. Sixteen-hour days do not ideal championship preparation make.

“She picked a good time to come alright,” he says. “It’s been pretty hectic, starting at seven in the morning and going until 11 at night. But my skipper has been good to me and let me off for training on Tuesday and Thursday. I’m fine as long as I get more than six hours’ sleep at night. Anything less than six hours and I’m like a bull.”

Somehow, it’s hard to picture Kavanagh in his bull-like state. He’s an easy-going sort, a shrugger. Thursday threw his birthday into the mix, not that he had time to so much as blow out a candle. “Gone 26 now,” he says. “Pushing on I am.”

Tomorrow will be the beginning of his seventh championship campaign, although as he says himself, he was never really a part of things until Kieran McGeeney arrived in Kildare four years ago. He was there but he wasn’t there. A squad man who probably thought he was worth a place in the side, as if probably thinking it was ever going to be enough to get him there. McGeeney’s arrival in June 2007 changed all that.

“The main thing with him from the start was that he was very professional. He brought in a new regime of how to work and how to behave. He showed us the effort that needs to be made to challenge at that level. I remember near enough the first thing that came out of his mouth was that there were no short-cuts to success and that if there was he would have found them by now. So if we had nothing else, we were going to have a work ethic from there on.

“I think it’s no harm for players to have a certain amount of fear of their manager. They have to command the respect of each player too and both those things surely aren’t lacking when it comes to Kieran. Before he arrived, I was at college and doing other things and I probably wasn’t giving 100 per cent to getting into the team.”

The four years under McGeeney have been the best of his footballing life. He went from scratching around in the margins of an underachieving side to two successive All Star nominations. One of the neon-lit names on a team that plays on into August each year now as a matter of routine.

There have been knock-ons too. Last October, he played his first matches for Ireland in the International Rules series, tapping home a goal in Croke Park during the second Test that sent the stadium into orbit. They had a night of nights in Jurys across the street afterwards but even without the requisite six hours’ sleep – “We fell into bed around five and were up and away at nine o’clock,” he says – he was still the star of the show in the Leinster Intermediate Club Championship match for Ballymore against Dundalk Young Irelands the following afternoon.

Ballymore’s run to an All-Ireland semi-final was an unexpectedly fun coda to an already fine year. Kavanagh says they were in danger of becoming nearly men at intermediate in Kildare, having lost a final, a semi-final and a couple of quarter-finals in recent years. But having come through the county, they rolled the dice in the provincial championships and rode them all the way through to the final.

Then the weather stuck its nose in. Despite “shovelling snow off the pitch for a fortnight” before the final against Nobber, the match was postponed until after Christmas.

One problem – Kavanagh and his fiancée were flying out to Australia for a month on December 28th and the match was fixed for January 16th. Of all the rotten luck. In the end, he flew back for the final, scored three points in a 0-12 to 0-10 win and headed off to Thailand the following day.

“The chairman called the whole thing a rollercoaster,” he says. “It was great to feel like a proper club player again. Back training with the club every night – you miss that when you’re with the county. Like, around this time of year, if you’re on the county panel you only go back to your club for a championship match. So it was actually nice to get stuck in with the lads again, playing with them every night. We never thought it would go so far.”

They played their first senior championship match since the mid-’90s a fortnight back and beat Suncroft so Kavanagh goes into county mode now with everyone’s blessing. Kildare have bent and shaped the qualifiers to their own liking over the past few seasons, tacking their way to two All-Ireland quarter-finals and last year’s epic semi-final against Down. But for all that the rhythm and beat of the qualifiers seems to suit their ear, Kavanagh will do without them this time around, thanks very much.

“We want a Leinster title, there’s no point denying it. There’s plenty of people saying that it’s of no use to you to win your provincial title but I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it. Neither would any of the lads. The qualifiers are good in terms of playing week after week and improving your sharpness but we want to win that Leinster. We won’t hide that fact at all.”

The way it all ended last year bought them plenty of grace and patience within the county. Benny Coulter’s square ball goal wasn’t their fault so by and large the defeat hasn’t been held against them. But for Kavanagh, that’s just supporter talk. A mile wide and an inch deep.

“It was a tough defeat to take because you’re in an All-Ireland semi-final and you might not get back there too quick. But everyone talks about that goal that should have been a square ball. The truth of the thing is that it came in the first half and we had loads of time to come back. That’s what you have to ask yourself afterwards. Yeah, we were a bit unlucky with some of the calls but you have to get on with it.

“It just makes you hungrier. You just have to learn. Each individual player has to go away and ask ourselves questions. We’re coming back now and we all need to squeeze that little bit more improvement out of each other.

“That’s the reality. You can’t blame anyone, you can’t hold anyone responsible only yourself. When things don’t go right, the first place to look is in the mirror.”

Spoken like a man who’s heard a McGeeney team-talk or two over the past four years. Or more to the point, spoken like a man who’s listened.