Tom Humphries recalls with Kevin Heffernan the years in the 1970s and 1980s that transformed Dublin football

He enjoyed the game best when it was played at a certain level, when he could detect signs of an active brain on the other bench. And that's what people forget perhaps when they moan about Heffernan being the catalyst for the era of the manager. Before Heffernan, football was just a tactical black hole.

Kerry had their gurus, Cavan and Down and Antrim had their moments, but the game never experienced a revolution like that of the 1970s. Ask him now which of those he played against he had a lot of time for, and he smiles across the table.

"None of them."

You clarify. Not liked. Just respected.

He laughs again. Not arrogance, just amusement at the gulf in understanding.

"At the time I would have had no time for any of them."

So you drag the answers out little by little.

Magee?

"In the 70s Magee and I would have spat at each other up and down sidelines, first when he was with UCD and I was with Vincent's and then when he was with Offaly and I was with Dublin. We would have disliked each other intensely.

"Now we can be civil to each other. Now we can have a chat and I think we're both surprised to find that we have a lot of views in common about the GAA. Back then, though, he was the enemy."

O'Dwyer? Just polite evasion here. A tricky one. O'Dwyer would be the nemesis, the living, breathing incarnation of all the dread Kerry cutery and yet he is one of those GAA figures who has allowed a huge gulf to remain between the public perception of him and the private reality in the dressing-room.

Many of the Dublin players of the 1970s felt that on the days when Kerry lost the Kerry management never came and congratulated their conquerors with the same speed and warmth that their management went to the Kerry dressing-room when the circumstances were reversed.

And yet, in a culture which placed so much stress on winning, surely not being able to greet defeat with a smile would be a weakness all too understandable.

Heffernan doesn't want to talk about O'Dwyer though. "He certainly played the game at that level."

Boylan?

"Ah Seán. Yeah, I have huge time for Boylan. The man and what he has done. One lovely fella."

And that's about it. It was an era before the O'Mahoney's, Hartes, Kernans, Maughans and Morgans. The era that fathered them.

It's late in the day now, but there is a part of Heffernan which would still like to be out there among them. Mixing it. Testing ideas. He looks at the new football as played by rampaging Ulster men and the cerebral side of the challenge they offer is irresistible to him. It's not pretty, this new game, but he sees in it a thought out process which is always appealing.

"There's a part of me that would like to have the energy and the platform to try it. If you see a team sending in half a dozen players to swamp the man in possession as Tyrone and Armagh do you have to think that it changes your view of possession.

"If half a dozen players arrive they have

to be leaving that space behind them, so

what would happen if instead of taking

those steps and solo runs the player kicked

to space straight away, if instead of even trying to catch he fisted the ball into the space.

"What would happen if you made the instant transfer of possession the basis of your game instead of possession itself. Would they take the risk of sending in the posse?"

As Kevin Heffernan talks you are borne backwards in time. Challenges and new ideas have always appealed to him. Early in 1974 the challenge facing Dublin football loomed over the local GAA scene like the face of Everest. The club teams whose names had danced in the imaginations of 1950s schoolchildren were gone or going.

Westerns. Geraldine's. Dympna's. Seán McDermott's. Columba's. Air Corps. Peadar Mackin's. Banba. All in mothballs or destined for them.

The suburbs besotted by television and the thrill of the new were slow to embrace Gaelic games. The country was in danger of being covered from Malin to Mizen in burgundy leatherette.

Heffernan devised a way of playing and a plan for earning the right to play.

As a young man in Trinity he played basketball for a while. It's not hard to picture Heffernan as a young hoopster. The confined space, the quick transfer, the tactical sophistication. Were he raised in Indiana rather than Ireland it would have been his game. Anyway: "Once we played UCG in a blitz above in Cathal Brugha Barracks. It was after the war and a lot of people in Trinity and especially in Galway were there on the GI Bill. We would have fancied ourselves a little as ball-players.

"We were standing about when UCG went past us. Out come all these fat guys with American accents, each of them as big as a ranch. I looked at them and laughed to myself. I said 'we'll run these fellas into the ground'. Well. They murdered us. We chased shadows all through. They moved around the place and they showed you the ball if they felt like it, mostly though they kept it moving and us chasing it. I'll never forget the disbelief in my head when the game was over. We were journeymen, they had exposed us. I couldn't believe what I had just seen. Stayed with me."

Other things. Those Thursdays when he would be flattened each week up in the O'Brien Institute. The memory of 1955 against Kerry and 1957 against Louth. Kerry's triumph of catch and kick. The realisation that Dublin had footballers, but the teams that beat them had good big footballers.

The desire to build a team built on the premise that a good big guy will always beat a good small guy. And a good big smart guy will be nearly impossible to beat. He went after the big smart guys.

There were casualties. Stalwart servants who were there at the start and had been there before, but who didn't make it all the way to September 1974. Patsey Markham served the county during almost the entirety of the bad times. Joe Reilly. Frank Murray. Others.

Heffernan knew what he wanted.

"We went after certain guys. We had a style of play and demands on those who wanted to play it. Certainly character would have been an issue. We would have looked for guys who showed that, fellas who would make the commitment and be able to stand it. We wanted guys who could adapt. It wasn't everything though, the guys we ended up with were exceptional people."

They trained hard through the winter in Coláiste Eoin in Finglas. They worked through the spring getting fitter and fitter till they were overrunning teams through sheer energy.

Heffernan wasn't a new face to most of the players, but this stint, (the first with just two mentors, Lorcan Redmond and Donal Colfer with him) was different. The wins bought Heffernan credibility. If he said jump. Players jumped. As high as they could.

"We started off the league that year depending on fitness to give us an initial boost. They weren't great teams we were playing anyway in the second division. As soon as we got the confidence from that we were able to put some tactical shape on things.

"Fitness and confidence grew and we developed our own pattern of play. The handpass was possible and as a team we saw its potential. We played Wexford in the first round in '74. Won alright, but we played badly. John Quigley, who hurled for Wexford as well, made the comment to one of the lads coming off the field that neither team would be seeing much more of Croke Park for the year.

"There was a replayed National League final on that day between Kerry and Roscommon and I watched and reckoned that this was the difference between men and boys. We looked second division.

"After that, Jimmy (Keaveney) came back. We got David Hickey back from the rugby. We were much more convincing next day against Louth. I always remember we didn't attract much attention, but after the Louth game Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh said he wouldn't be surprised if the winners of this match went a good way further.

"That was a big statement given that they were playing Offaly the next day."

Was Heffernan lucky? If he was, he knew how to get lucky. The colossus that would be Brian Mullins had broken through on to the county team that spring, but had played for St Vincent's in an All-Ireland club final and replay the previous year. Keaveney, as portrayed in popular myth, had become a caricature like Barney from The Simpsons, a barfly whom Heffernan had to have surgically removed from a beer tap in St Vincent's.

In fact, Keaveney too, was playing good club football, still had the sweetest kicking foot in the game and was only 29. He needed to lose weight, but just as importantly Heffernan had to give him an appetite for other things.

And Hickey? The wing forwards would be the keystone of the team which emerged. Hickey had the style of the natural athlete, carried the intelligence which was at the core of the team and in a way that freed him from fear saw the entire thing as an inner journey. It was about the player he might become.

"I played just once in 1973, I think. I was playing rugby the following year when Heffernan came looking for me and, to be honest, Kevin was pushing an open door. All I wanted to do was play with Dublin. If there was something serious happening with Dublin I wanted to play."

That there was something serious happening became apparent when Dublin beat Offaly that year. If Dublin teams at the time were regularly dismissed as tea and biscuits merchants, Offaly were the quintessential meat and two veg country team, big and old-fashioned. Dublin always had trouble with them.

By 1974, Offaly had been in the previous five Leinster finals, winning four of them. They had won the All-Irelands of 1971 and 1972 and had earned the right to be dismissive about Dublin teams.

"We were talking about characters," says Heffernan. "Well, I remember the day before we played Offaly that year we had a meeting in Parnell Park. We were just beginning to get motoring and players were starting to believe in themselves and it was a good meeting.

"We said everything that needed to be said and the lads were just getting up to leave when Gay O'Driscoll stood up and gave this passionate speech about how he was a sub the next day and if anyone in the room, anyone felt like they weren't up to it, there was him and others waiting who would give their arm to be out there playing. He told them not to forget that."

There would be other speeches like that in the Dublin dressing-room in subsequent years but that morning stuck with Heffernan. "The next day I had to bring Dave Billings off. Gay got in. I don't think he lost his place for six years after that."

"That's all true," says Billings. "Gay came on in the second half. I played a little hurling the same time. The same week as we played Offaly, I played Dublin Under 21-hurling. That wouldn't have gone down well.

"Gay had the jersey beforehand, in fairness, the jersey was his. Offaly would have been in a couple of All-Ireland finals in the years beforehand. I was marking Séamus Darby that day. He was low to the ground, hard to mark.

"We'd won the Leinster Under-21 that year. Me, Brian Mullins , Bernard Brogan Fran Ryder and John McCarthy. They brought us into the senior scene late to freshen it up. We'd grown up watching Tony and Jimmy and them play.

"Heffernan freshened up the panel. Gay wouldn't have been as disciplined then as he subsequently became. That started him on a great career."

"That day would have been typical. So was what happened the next day out. Gay was away, but never said he'd been on a week's holiday. We played Kildare and I was picked to play. Gay came back on the Sunday morning and Heff wanted to see what shape he was in so he played him in one half of a club match that morning and stuck him in the team that afternoon."

The day against Offaly is remembered for a last-minute point by Leslie Deegan which gave Dublin a 1-11 to 0-13 victory. Deegan had come on as a first-half sub and scored a goal before the break.

"It was a wonderful score," remembers Heffernan fondly. "Leslie was a unique player. And it came about through hard work. I always compliment Stephen Rooney when I meet him, Stephen tracked back from midfield and blocked down an Offaly shot that day and started the move. I always say Stephen, 'you only did it the once but it worked well'."

"Leslie," recalls Dave Billings, "could walk into a shower and one hundred other people could walk in and Leslie would be the one to walk on a little piece of glass. His career was destroyed with injuries, but that day he set us on the way."

Leslie Deegan would be a peripheral name for the rest of the '70s, but he remained part of Heffernan's bag of tricks. Sometimes it was just the simplest thing that undid teams.

Back in 1974, Kildare were waiting for the good times to come. They had won an All-Ireland Under-21 title in 1965 and three more Leinster Under-21 titles since then. They could feel that Lilywhite express coming from afar.

In 1974, on May 5th, Dublin lost a league play-off game to Kildare - 3-13 to 2-9. Dublin scored two goals early. Kildare came back. Summer got up and running and, soon afterwards, Dublin were invited to Naas for a challenge. Kildare were looking for a little meat to devour. Heffernan gave it to them.

He played half of the team he had mentally picked for the championship and watched them lose by 16 points. Six weeks later, on July 14th, the teams met in the championship. Kildare had an eye on the main prize already. They lost by six points. Young Brian Mullins scored a penalty. Kildare deserved to lose by more.

Pat Gogarty remembers coming off the pitch in the company of Olly Crinnigan of Kildare with Crinnigan muttering all the way about the shrewdness of Heffernan.

"We never saw it coming, Pat. That's some shrewd bastard."

And Kildare were gone. The following January, the sides met in the league. Dublin won by 15. In the 1975 Leinster final, the margin would be 14. Dublin had 18 wides that day. The Leinster final that year was against Meath. Heffernan is in the habit of noting that Dublin struggled against Meath, because teams can only ever struggle against Meath, but the five-point win was just about as comfortable as the margin suggests. When Dublin beat Offaly they turned themselves into a different team. There were new certainties.

"At the start of the year, I would have been looking at one match at a time and possibly a Leinster title," says Heffernan. "Myself, Lorcan and Donal wouldn't have been ones to look much further at the best of times, but certainly after Offaly I think we all raised our sights a bit."

"We got lucky in 1974 in that we won a couple of matches," says David Hickey. "And that gave us the confidence we needed. After Offaly, I think the team started to grow. I'm not sure if Heffernan and the lads would ever have thought beyond Leinster that year, but when we beat Offaly the players began to look up."

You need to know where GAA was at that time. The All-Ireland semi-final against Cork that year was played on an afternoon which co-incided with the last day of the Dublin Horse Show. RTÉ's outside broadcast units went to the gee-gees. Missing from the archives is the proof of one of the great Dublin performances of any era.

"I remember," says David Hickey. "That Jimmy Barry Murphy burst through early on and he hit the woodwork with a shot that was so fierce that it came out and almost hit me 40 yards away down the pitch.

"I was just reacting to it when Denis Coughlan came past and took the ball as if he'd wanted half my head with it. I thought, 'Jesus, this is going to be a match'."

It was. Cork were the All-Ireland champions and something of a wonder team, for whom, not two but three-in-a-row was expected. There was an old certainty in Dublin going back to Heffernan's playing days, however, that Dublin teams never lost games to Cork teams. In the new Dubs, that belief found easy purchase.

"I remember that day as perhaps the greatest performance the fellas gave," says Heffernan. "I'd put it up there with the 1977 semi-final. Cork scored a goal at one stage with 16 men on the pitch (a JBM penalty).

"We just swept down and stuck it in the other end. In the final that year we were nervy and had to grind it out a bit, but in that game against Cork we played the way we wanted to play."

The game was an 80-minute semi-final and Dublin sucker-punched Cork in terms of both fitness and tactics. The running game found its fullest expression that afternoon and the memory is of Hickey and Anton O'Toole, in particular, rampaging repeatedly through prairies of space in the Cork half.

Heffernan always enjoyed Cork, always reckoned that hubris would undo them. That year, he seized upon a jocular remark made by Billy Morgan to Jimmy Keaveney when Keaveney was paying a social visit that summer.

Morgan stepped back into his house to show Keaveney the Sam Maguire and wisecracked that the Dub might as well get a good look at it.

"Well we took that and we played it and played it in the dressing-room. Billy meant nothing by it, but we turned it into Cork arrogance."

He never found Cork a problem. He skips by way of digression to another afternoon nine years later when his rebuilt Dubs team went to Páirc Uí Chaoimh and hammered Cork in another semi-final (a replay this time.

"You know going to Cork that year was a great gift. They came out and demanded it, demanded that we play down there. We just said alright if you want to put yourselves under all that pressure. In the first game in 1983 Jimmy Kerrigan was playing left half back and he was crucifying us all day with his attacking runs.

"He was dragging Barney Rock back up field all the time. We talked and talked about it. Finally, we decided that they'd have their left full back John Evans hugely psyched up to follow John Caffrey everywhere he went (Caffrey playing as a third midfielder, but starting as corner forward, had been how Heffernan sucker-punched Offaly earlier that summer).

"So we decided, to list the team as usual. Then we'd put Caffrey half forward and Barney into the corner. Cork bought it perfectly. They got one of their full back line out chasing Caffrey around. Kerrigan came back into the corner to mark Barney."

He puts down the coffee cup. Grins.

"I loved that part of the game. Getting into the other guy's head. How will we upset him. How will we make him play the way we want him to play. That's the buzz."

In 1974, when they beat Cork, the final against Galway had a certain inevitability about it. On the day, a huge panel of Dublin players burst from under the Cusack Stand wearing pristine white tracksuits.

Hill 16 was a chaos of banners. Before the end of the day, the pitchside fencing would have given way, Heffernan would be on the field appealing for calm and Dublin would be waltzing away from what looked like an outdated Galway team.

"Was it better playing or managing. Really the pleasure of winning is a physical pleasure, but as a player, as a manager, it's a more cerebral business. Can you beat him tactically or intellectually? It's in there you get a little buzz.

"That day in 1974 though we achieved it altogether. The county board who set up the new structure, the management team, the players, the support we had.

"I remember the colour of that day, the banners. It was personally uncomfortable, perhaps, to be at the centre of it but it was spectacular. You could feel that you were part of something new and unique."

If the breakthrough came in 1974, well the hinge years which would define the era soon followed. The seasons of 1975 and 1976 serve as a compression not just of Heffernan's lifelong obsession with football and Kerry, but of his relationship with the team of the 1970s.

Had they won just that first All-Ireland and faded away into a respectable anonymity, there would be unanimity about Heffernan's contribution now. Instead, they grew, as an organic group and as a team. They lost. They regrouped.

There were ruthless things which needed to be done. An entire half back line disappeared between the All-Ireland of 1975 and that of the following year. There were hard things which needed to be said.

Players dropped then are still upset about it now.

What is remarkable is this. Loved or loathed by those who played for him, Heffernan has never been a subject of indifference. No player who came under his guidance is vague about their impressions of him. Nobody sits on the fence. The mention of his name prompts as surely as a cattle prod.

In the quarter of a century or so since the last of their six consecutive All-Ireland appearances, the team of the '70s have grown outside the game. Mostly they have been as extravagantly successful off the field as they were on it. They have endured two and a half decades of real life, had all that time to adjust perspective.

Still, though, they navigate around Heffernan. As a group, they are uncommonly tight. The bonds created in the little room in Parnell Park and on the white hot surface of Croker are still there.

And within the grouping they have accommodated a sort of benign revisionism which debunks the creationist view of Heffernan and the '70s.

Did Heffernan make the men? Did the men make Heffernan? They say that within the Dublin panel of the day there were favourites and there were expendables. David Hickey was inexpendable and he knew it. He was a favourite, too, and he knew it.

"I was one of the guys Kevin needed," he says. "I earned whatever I had going with him because I was part of the plan."

He says it as a matter of fact and he is correct. Of the group, Mullins was the great heart who kept beating to the end, the figure who dragged the team on his shoulders through matches.

Hickey was the natural athlete though. Hickey was the style, the zip, the burst and the panache.

He has become the most outspoken of the Heffernan critics within the team, the first to re-evaluate the relationships between players and their manager. Not a vendetta. Nothing personal. Just his views as a guy who put down his years in the room in Parnell Park.

"Listen," he says at one point. "I don't want to come across as the guy who is always moaning about Kevin. I give him credit for what he achieved. He saw the openings for a new style of play, he moulded the team, he gave us belief. I'm just against the deification of one man at the expense of the effort of the others."

"OK," you say "we'll go back. Tell me about 1975."

He laughs. Dives in again.

"Totally Kevin's fault."

In 1975, Kerry came out of the south and undid Dublin on a low, greasy day in September.

Heffernan, as the leading Kerryologist in the city knew what was coming.

"I knew they had a good team. I knew they were coming. They didn't take us unawares. They were good, innate footballers. They could think for themselves on the field. I always think that in '75 we were unfortunate to concede the first free. A bad free. A greasy day. Gay O'Driscoll didn't hold it, it spilled onto a fella's boot and the ball was in the net. That gave them the confidence and the impetus they needed. That's not to detract from them. They were a great team. We needed to keep them under."

Hickey doesn't dispute that Heffernan saw Kerry coming. He argues that he worried too much about them coming. That he abandoned the philosophy of letting the other guy do the worrying.

"The week before that final we did gruelling training sessions. We were over-trained. We did one night out in the rain for the benefit of the media. We came down on the Saturday and did another session. Then in the dressing-room beforehand we did yoga for 20 minutes, something we'd never done before. We were supposed to be bouncing out onto the field and we hit the turf just glad to have survived the week.

"I think Kevin had this thing about Kerry and rather than sit at home worrying about them he'd get the team down to Parnell Park so he could feel as if he was doing something."

The game against Kerry is remembered for another reason. The dropping of Bobby Doyle.

The team went into the game in a state of some mental disarray. Paddy Gogarty started the match and played well, but was aware of what had gone on and the essential strangeness of it.

"I was a different sort of player to Bobby. I know that. Bobby played a running game. I played quite a bit of the 1975 season and I thought I deserved a shot at a place in the final. I got it but it would have been put to me at the time during All-Ireland week that I should go and have a word with Bobby. Sort of explain to him why I was in the team ahead of him."

Bobby Doyle remembers it differently.

"I was told that I might have a chat with Paddy. Smooth things over. If possible. I remember after the team was announced in Parnell Park, people coming out to the house as if there had been a death. It was one of those things. You were told but it wasn't explained." And Hickey was somewhere in the middle.

" I went to Kevin Heffernan that week and said that this was wrong. Paddy Gogarty was a different player. He'd shoot from anywhere, which was great when it came off but wasn't the game we were playing. Obviously Paddy felt differently. I went to Heffernan and he made it clear that players didn't pick the team." So they lost. Came back the next year obsessive and hungry. With a new half back line.

"Three players the like of which just don't come along together at the same time," says Heffernan now.

They won and won well. Setting a new high for style. Creating new levels of interest. And the following week Heffernan gathered the team into a room in the Gresham and announced that he was packing it in.

Hickey's response, famously, was to utter the words "Is that it?" but he felt hurt by the abandonment. Still feels Heffernan was wrong to leave without explaining the circumstances. And was more wrong to come back. "I think he left for the theatrical value of it. He gave no explanation. Just left us there. I think it was a betrayal of Lorcan and Donal and the boys."

Heffernan is familiar with the arguments. "In 1976 there was a lot going on. There was a fear in my mind of staleness. We'd been on the go for a few years. Perhaps they needed a new voice. There were issues in my working life. I just thought it was time to step away.

"I wouldn't like to get into a debate with David but the team that won in 1976 was the very same that won in 1977. And played again in 1978. I would assume they were playing the same game. I assume the changes can't have been that disruptive. I kept going to 1985. We lost a lot of matches in that time but I kept going."

Hickey's is no scattergun attack. He is the most outspoken of a tendency within the side and he has the most issues.

"I think as a team we were never allowed develop. I would feel that as a player I never got the most out of myself, never developed into what I could have been because Kevin had very clear roles for us and he set the limits as to what he wanted each player doing."

That Hickey who was on the verge of drifting from the sport but went on to win three All-Ireland medals should feel unfulfilled speaks much for the quality of intellect in the Dublin dressing-room at the time. It was inevitable, perhaps, given the type of players Heffernan assembled that they would become less biddable and more strong-willed over time.

"I think the way Kevin walked away was bad and even worse was when he just came back after 1977. We had won a league and a championship under Tony Hanahoe and suddenly as if he'd hopped over the wire in Parnell Park he was back again and everyone moved over to accommodate him.

"I believe that having him back undermined us a little and that some of the brittleness we showed in the 1978 final came from that."

Hickey has other issues. He argues that his brother Michael got a raw deal from the team selectors in the late 1970s. That very few of the endings to players' careers were handled with dignity.

"I give Kevin credit for what he started. I just don't agree with the cult. He got us to All-Irelands but if you look back he has presided over more losing All-Ireland final teams than any other manager."

Heffernan is not one for argument at this stage. Dublin lost five of the nine All-Irelands they played in from 1974 to 1985. That sustained level of just being there was the achievement, he reckons. What had to be done was done. He knows that players were ditched, terminated, drifted, dropped or disappointed. He knows there were great days, indelible memories. One didn't happen without the other.

"We'd talk the same as ever David and I. That's his view and if it is his view, so be it. It's not something to be argued about. There's nothing can be done to change things. I find I have still very good relationships with them all. I'm not at loggerheads with anybody or do I know that they are at loggerheads with me.

"I wouldn't like to believe that I ruled by fear. I wouldn't like to believe that I treated any player with disrespect. I wouldn't like them to have the impression that I was constantly scheming. There was a group discipline there. The enforcement of it would be a group thing. That would be my belief. We created the circumstances for that group discipline and its enforcement. We all wanted the same objective."

He is at one with Hickey, though, when it comes to regretting 1978. Perhaps his words give a hint as to why he came back.

"In 1978 we were ahead. We led 0-6 to 0-1 but I was never comfortable. We weren't penetrating, we were scoring from Jimmy's frees. If we had held on and won that match it would have been three in a row. That would have screwed them. I reckon Kerry would have done something stupid. Dropped half of them or got a new manager or whatever. Their confidence would have gone."

And with that it was gone. That 1978 final would have a bitter epilogue in the protracted dispute over Seamus Aldridge's refereeing of the game. Dublin had never seen eye to eye with Aldridge and the wound burst after that final.

There was a sad postscript the following year also when an old team sleepwalked to the final and into the propellors of a rampant Kerry.

Heffernan did the hard thing. He rebuilt, winning an All-Ireland in 1983 on the shoulders of Mullins , O'Toole and Tommy Drumm of the old guard. It was a remarkable achievement but another story. He remembers now that he finished off with another two beatings by Kerry. He shrugs his shoulders. Same old same old, time to go.

The interview is done. He's had enough. He talks for a while about his worries, the depair at things he sees in the GAA, locally, nationally. He's not one of life's great talkers, though. Questions irritate him sometimes. He leaves his coffee cup back behind the bar in Vincent's, makes his way down the stairs and into the cold and dark of the car-park.

Sitting on a railing on the way out like crows on a telegraph line are a flock of young fellas, backs turned, chatting to young ones. Lost in it.

Heffernan taps each on the back with the knuckle of his middle finger.

"Night Seán, night John." Etc, Etc.

Each in turn swivels and says "Night Kevin." You are reminded of an old friend's story about how you can judge a man's relationship to Heffernan by how he addresses him or refers to him. Enemies say Heffernan. Fans say Heffo. Old players say Heff or The Heff. Close friends just call him Kevin.

Every kid on the rail calls him Kevin. These are perhaps his last team. Last year's Vincent's Under-15 hurlers. They weren't born when Kevin Heffernan ruled this world.

"I felt sorry for Mick Slattery, who was coaching them. Mick was kind of on his own. I said I'd go down an odd Saturday. Not to be offensive I didn't know what they were getting ready for when I saw them. I went down a couple of Saturdays and I was slowly sucked into it. They were so bad and the summer was so good."

They were bad. As a team they'd never won anything. Heffernan and Slattery and another friend Seán Buckley dragged the kids through the summer.

"I didn't realise kids went away for so much of the summer but when they were around they were great for training. We had four months or maybe more. Never missed a session, only got wet once. The fellas there improved out of recognition. Simple things we did but we did them well. We did them consistently. They were a smashing bunch of young lads." They played ground hurling. Won the championship, beating Ballyboden in the final with an avalanche of goals. The Heff had done it again. Seventy four years of age.

"Just the energy is gone," he says. "Don't ask me will I take another team because winter isn't the time. When the sun shines I'll know.

"Starting off with those (young hurlers), they didn't know who I was but they recognised I was serious. Wasn't on for messing. When they got used to my bark they were great. You have to get used to my bark." And he saunters off into the night, through a GAA heartland which survives because of him. Unique. A man of bite and bark. A presence.

The boys on the railing don't turn their heads back to the girls until he's gone.