Martin O'Neill was adamant: he would not be appearing, he would not be speaking. It was Wednesday lunchtime, Leicester City's training ground, an open day for the press to meet the squad before tomorrow's English League Cup final.

These events are always of dubious benefit. Generally haphazard, they are known as bun fights. For the star turn to be intent on unseen silence, it was a fight without buns.

The players may have posed in their smart, new, all-black Wembley suits, gone through the motions of giving interviews - Spanish fire extinguishers were not to be mentioned - but Leicester without O'Neill is like a theatre without a play: tangible perhaps, but quiet. O'Neill is Filbert Street's lyrical dramatist.

But O'Neill insisted on omerta. Faxes, phone calls and more phone calls had yielded the same response. We were just hanging about, grazing on the conversations of others.

Then came a signal. You three, come through here. Sixty seconds later, sitting in O'Neill's unremarkable office, the tape recorders and notebooks were already facing meltdown. O'Neill's mouth was off and running. The Istabraq of talkers had hurdled the silence.

We knew he would. In Belfast, O'Neill would be called a slabber. But not harshly, for while he is capable of ferocity with his tongue, there is massive affection for a man so good at his job and so articulate when discussing it.

That said, the one-time Queen's University law student once said, "Don't put me on a pedestal", about his "unusual-in-football" intelligence, and on Wednesday he told an anecdote about how he had bought bookmakers shops in the 1970s for his brothers to run.

"The thing is, I was gambling myself. They would say to me: `We've had a great day, taken £123,' and I would say: `That's because I've just bet £123.' What was the point of them coming in to find that they had won the amount I had just lost? What's it called, a Pyrrhic victory?" He didn't say if Pyrrhic Victory was the name of a horse.

The paradox was obvious to O'Neill, but then it should be, as a contradiction runs through him. Whether it be a hugely talented and ambitious manager slaving away at hugely average clubs like Wycombe Wanderers and Leicester City; a Catholic captain of Northern Ireland at the height of Ulster's sectarianism and Windsor Park's Orangeism; a law student playing professional football; 48 on Wednesday and looking 35; or a gambling bookmaker, O'Neill seems to have meticulously thrashed his way through life.

As Gerry Taggart said of his manager: "He's very methodical but not in a very methodical way, if you know what I mean." O'Neill knows exactly what he means.

"There is a paradox between the two sides of my nature," O'Neill said. "Sometimes the emotional moment is more decisive than the analytical moment. I think I have got a decent, logical brain. One of my daughters, who is at university, has got the same sort of brain. "But I have a wife who is totally illogical, and my daughter and I sometimes smile at each other when she is talking. We're thinking: `How has her conversation jumped from there to there?' You're supposed to go three or four stages before you get to that point. Just because somebody upsets you in a supermarket, that doesn't mean you can call all Scotsmen stupid."

Logic and sport, however, are hardly twins. For all O'Neill's attention to detail, intelligent planning is often superfluous when the whistle blows and a ball is kicked.

"It does not ever go to plan," he said. "Sometimes you can have two plans for a match and the game follows a third plan. Sometimes I actually have a sore head at the end of a match thinking about all the things which might have materialised."

It is not difficult to picture O'Neill sitting behind his desk with a headache, his mind searching furiously for answers to questions he had not expected to be raised. Nor does it feel difficult to say that O'Neill probably needs this. It is Alex Ferguson's contention that O'Neill is driven by the requirement to prove both to himself and to the rest of football that he is among the very best of his profession.

Ferguson, an O'Neill fan, says the proof of his argument is evident in the type of players O'Neill buys. Whether it be Neil Lennon, rejected by Manchester City as a teenager, or Taggart or Matt Elliott, once a bricklayer, O'Neill always plumps for outsiders and underdogs.

Robbie Savage was with Ferguson at Old Trafford as an apprentice. Now Stan Collymore is at Leicester, though ineligible tomorrow. A team and a manager with a big, collective chip.

O'Neill has some sympathy with this analysis. His own playing career, he said, was dominated by trying to please Brian Clough on the right wing at Nottingham Forest. It was not Clough who bought O'Neill, though. Matt Gillies did that in 1971 when O'Neill was at Queen's and playing for Distillery - for whom he once scored against Barcelona. Within O'Neill's first month in England, Gillies threw his fresh 19-year-old into a game at Old Trafford in which George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton played. O'Neill again scored.

But it is with Clough, who arrived at Forest in 1975, that people compare O'Neill. Repetitive though this must be to O'Neill, he deals with queries respectfully.

"I have often said that it would have been difficult to work with that man for five years and not have learned anything from him. You would have to be dense not to do that. "But I often thought that if you tried to copy someone like Brian Clough you would find yourself in a moment of crisis trying to think what he would do. Even worse, you would probably be tempted to phone him for help. That is probably why I have never phoned him up in my life. If something goes wrong, at least it will be me who has made the decision, not a clone.

"I never got on with him too cleverly when I was at Forest. I used to think that I had done quite well in this game or that, and he would come into the dressing-room and praise everyone else and leave me out of it. Like all of us to one extent or another, I thrived on praise and I was not getting it from him. "I was always in the team when it counted, I suppose, which should have been praise enough, but he spent most of his half-time praising John Robertson (now O'Neill's assistant) or John McGovern. He didn't really have any time left for me.

"I would speak up, but it was always a sort of sarcastic remark. I have realised now that that is crap when you do that as a player and crap when you do that as a manager." A slabber regrets.

Recently, however, O'Neill has been the object of sarcasm rather than the purveyor. In the past few weeks both Arsene Wenger and John Gregory have criticised Leicester's style. But then Arsenal and Aston Villa were both beaten. "Some of the criticism hurt, because Arsene Wenger should know better and John Gregory should know better. And they do know better. It was something they said to mask things they did not do themselves."

Painted as boring and mercenary, Leicester then had the fall-out of Collymore in La Manga. The image of a feisty family club taking on the big guns was obliterated. They need a victory - with style - against Tranmere.

That would put Leicester back in Europe. This is their third Wembley final in four years. It is remarkable consistency given the growing financial disparity in the Premiership. It is also a sign of O'Neill's success that the fans staged "Martin Must Stay" demonstrations during the Leicester boardroom wrangling and when he was approached by Leeds United. Some of these fans must have been the same people who called for his head not long after he succeeded Mark McGhee in December 1995.

"I was getting letters saying: `What is happening to our Leicester City?' and I was thinking: `The same as usual, it is steeped in mediocrity.' At the end of the season when we got promoted it was delightful for me to call them and get my own back. That is something only a man who had lost his senses would do, but I had lost mine. It wasn't really normal behaviour. But after a dodgy beginning I have loved it here."

The question, of course, is how long can O'Neill remain at Leicester. He said, after all: "I would not want to leave the profession without having won the championship. It is really nice and pleasing when people say it is a big achievement to have done what I have at Leicester, but I don't believe a word of it. Every manager in the country will eventually be judged by what they win. I will not be considered top of the tree unless I win a championship."

The man from Kilrea with the more than decent brain then refused to mention the logical next step. He knew he would be talking paradoxes again.