Emmet Malone talks to Pat Dolan, whose first game in charge of Cork City takes place in familiar surroundings

This Saturday's reunion between Pat Dolan and the Inchicore club he left behind a couple of months ago may have proven impossible for them to resist out at TV3, but as he reflects on his 10 years at Richmond Park and the work he has just started at Turner's Cross, it's hard to escape the feeling that the new Cork City boss reckons the fixtures people have done him no favours at all.

That Dolan is enthusiastic about his new job goes without saying, of course. His talk of the club's enormous potential, both on and off the field, is very much what we have come to expect of a man who was central to the dramatic progress made by St Patrick's Athletic in recent years.

His departure from the Dublin club into which he poured so much energy seems, however, to have taken a little of the edge off the conviction with which he speaks of his many visions of the future. More pointedly, though, there is a feeling that he will hurt for some time over the way his time at St Patrick's was, in the end, consigned to the past.

Dolan's life clearly revolved around the club during his time there, but he speaks of the period now as though it was a dream from which he has only recently awoken. They were hectic times during which a huge amount was achieved but the cost, he admits now, both in terms of personal relationships and the toll taken on his own health by the daily struggle of coping, was fairly hefty too.

"When Brian (Kerr) took over as (Ireland) manager the Star published a picture of the two of us together just after I arrived at the club, and when I showed it to other people some of them didn't even recognise me," he sighs.

"To look at me then, I was amazingly physically fit, a good looking fella (he laughs), but . . . I didn't have a talent for separating my work life from my personal life and what was dreadful during the time there was the burden of responsibility that I felt every single day that I was getting up in the morning and doing nothing else but my very best for the club."

During his time there, it was not uncommon for other people involved in the club to privately express their concern to outsiders that Dolan's dedication would cost him his health. While he only touches on the issue himself now, he certainly makes it clear that he was far from happy.

"It was a strange situation for me," he says. "I'd never been involved in confrontation in my life and then suddenly I was in a situation where there was confrontation every single day. Part of it was my fault. I felt this huge responsibility of having helped to build something up while still knowing how fragile it was. You do become obsessed in those circumstances and it's not healthy.

"But other people contributed to it too," he insists while never mentioning a single name in either a positive or negative way. "We'd win a league and that night would be very difficult because suddenly there'd be a problem. After winning the title in 1998 we went out to celebrate and when I looked around some of the people were gone. These were pivotal people in the club but the pressure was so great that as soon as we'd won the thing they wanted out and I didn't see them again until just before the Celtic match."

When the club retained the league under Liam Buckley the following season, Dolan maintains that his preoccupation with continuing the success was such that he spent a good part of the evening attempting to sign a player from another club for the following season. That day, he says, the title was clinched in the late afternoon. He talked to the player at eight o'clock and was back home by himself by 10. For anyone who has seen him work the crowd in McDowell's after a St Patrick's match, it all seems inconceivable, but then who could have imagined that a man for whom the club's achievements meant so much would describe the evening of a championship win as "an absolute nightmare".

The strain of juggling so many roles - he was at various times team manager, commercial manager, and chief executive, titles which only seemed to touch upon the multitude of tasks he undertook on a daily basis - was at the heart of his unhappiness, he insists, with the one time underage international defender remarking: "You've got to put on a performance the whole time, but while you are out there trying to get on with things, in the back of your head there's a pain."

His memories of the player of the year awards dinner in 1998 are typical of what he sees as having gone wrong. "I was organising the thing and feeling very much on my own," he says. "I remember that afternoon trying to source a telly for the draw 'cos we needed the money. I was carrying it up the steps of the hotel when I got a call on the phone. It was four and the do was supposed to start at eight, and it was one of the players wanting to know if I would have their bonuses that evening.

"It was a night when you wanted to just turn up, sit back and say 'isn't it wonderful, we've won the league'. But I had to get that money together. Later on, I called the players outside and gave it to them. They would have got a lot of pleasure out of that night, I got none whatsoever."

From outside the club, though, all that was visible was the siege mentality that he possessed in huge quantities. It's not entirely gone and even now, when he feels he can be more dispassionate about the situation, he says: "We knew we had to be good at St Pat's because Shels and Bohs and Rovers were trying to cut our throats."

The competition, he says, spurred all of the Dublin clubs on to achieve more but in Cork, he says, there are other advantages, not least the loyalty of an entire city's population to the club and its apparent ability to attract considerably bigger crowds than any of its rivals.

"What we did at St Pat's spurred the bigger Dublin clubs to take it all to the next level and I think that logic would suggest that they will dominate the league again this season. It's up to us, though, to get on with following down the same road and while we're starting from a lower base, I have no doubt at all about our ability to achieve what we want."

The idea this time, he says, is that while he will have some role in the commercial side of the club, his main job will be to manage the football team. He mentions the dedication of the players to the cause as one of the one of the most positive things he has encountered since arriving. It is, he says, a characteristic of the city's people but, whatever his flaws, dedication is a quality they will do very well to match their new boss for.