Tom Humphries talks to a player who has taken more than his fair share of criticism on the field of play but no one can question his passion for playing for his country.

Gary Breen comes striding from the elevator waving apologies for being a little late. He's all purpose and business, lean and gaunt beneath a new haircut. A man having the time of his life.

People use that phrase lightly. The time of his life! For Gary Breen, though, being here, wearing an Irish jersey, playing the best football he has played in that jersey - well, it's the time he's spent his life waiting for.

When he dreamed as a kid, he dreamed of this, and when he got older he went about executing his dream. He's said it before and he says it to you again. All the football he played in London, even back when Irishness was neither popular nor profitable, he never dreamed of Wembley and cup finals.

"I only dreamt of playing for Ireland."

Irishness comes in varying strengths and qualities, but for Breen his country is the passion of his life, its football the music he has been tuned to since childhood.

When the celebrations which marked the final whistle of the German game last week had subsided, he reflected that perhaps it was all a little over the top, but "You know, it didn't seem like the World Cup when we first got here. With all we went through and everything.

"But that evening against Germany, that's what I remember as a kid, that's something I would have been jumping all over the place about. The way we got so carried away, I don't want people to think we were happy with a draw against Germany, it's just it was such a late equaliser that, well, we believed we could win the game going into it. It must have looked like we'd won the bloody thing, but that's what it's all about, it's what you dream of."

Always those green dreams, that theme running through his London-bound life.

Don't kick him off about the great Kerry teams of the late 70s or early 80s, or his own pedigree which stretches back to his great-grandfather Paddy, who won a couple of All-Irelands with Kerry back early in the last century.

He was brought to Croke Park often as a kid, but inevitably his environment as much as his blood influenced him.

If those childhood summers in Beaufort had run into the right sort of boom time you can picture him as an elegant midfielder for Kerry, but other dreams intruded. This is the kid who wore an Irish jersey to school on the day after Ireland beat England in Stuttgart in 1988.

He had a houseful of mates around when Dave O'Leary scored in Genoa. He was in an Irish bar in Kentish Town when Alan McLoughlin scored in Windsor Park and somebody drenched him in beer and he remembers standing, still wet, and the TV flipping to Spain versus Denmark and watching through the cracks in his fingers.

"The World Cup? It's all about that sort of thing, and when you're here, when you're here at last, you're imagining what it would be like back home in the pubs and clubs and houses and everyone going mad. You watched those moments and that's what you wanted to play in. That's what you set out for."

And there has indeed been something methodical and calculated about Gary Breen's progress to this point, a plottedness which belies the fervour and emotion he brings to football. He's never been one to surrender his individuality lightly.

When he was in his early teens he was confined to bed for half a year with a tumour on the base of his spine, and in the months before a successful operation you imagine he acquired some part of the serene stillness he carries with him at times.

After a hugely successful schoolboy career, he had offers to just about any club he wanted to but opted to do his A Levels and then signed for Maidstone United so he could get the benefits of individual coaching and be allowed finish his studies.

He has been that way ever since, taking every step when he is ready. A league debut at Maidstone when he was just 16, then from Maidstone to Gillingham to Peterborough to Birmingham to Coventry, where for better or worse he has spent the last five years.

And here's an irony: last Wednesday night, after the game of his life against Germany, he came into the mixed zone and the first question he took was asked by an American journalist. Poor soul had confused Gary Breen with a homeless waif.

"You have no club at the moment. Do you hope that your displays here will help you get one." Breen could only smile.

"People say that I'm without a club, but they don't understand that it's quite methodical. I was offered a contract at Coventry. I said no. I'm approaching what should be my prime and I don't think it suits me to be in the first division anymore.

"Not at this stage. I want to play at the top level, I want to be involved in things like this. I'm lucky enough to be here and I want more. All that personal stuff is on the back burner, but it's not good luck or bad luck. It was planned."

That planning, that cool part of his nature, serves him well generally. He says he never gets nervous before games - indeed, over the years, until recently, a problem of his has been a tendency to lose concentration once or twice a game. Here in Japan, though, he has found himself inside the skin of the tournament, feeling its heartbeat. His passion and desire has surprised everyone, including team-mates. In the huddles before games they have to hush him like 10 librarians.

"I know, I know," he smiles. "Stan is the captain but I like to take charge in those things and I was telling everyone what to do and Stan tried to get in four or five times without me even noticing. I'm very emotional about it, very emotional about playing for Ireland. It's difficult. I never really get nervous about games, but here I'd be distraught if my mistake cost us or anything. It was the same coming here, till we qualified. I'd hate to have cost the team anything.

"So I'm passionate and emotional about it. I've no inhibitions. I'm confident. I want to do well for my team-mates, for my family, for the country."

And in the knot of passion that is the green huddle before each game, what has Gary Breen got to say that hasn't been said among men who have been through more than the average platoon of footballers?

"No regrets. That's been a big thing here for us. It's big with all the lads, the idea that we might only be here once, that we have this moment and we have to do it now. You can have no inhibitions. You don't want to come off the pitch thinking we should have done this, should have done that. We're all here for each other and we don't want to leave anything behind on the pitch. It's been ongoing for about five years with this squad. We remind ourselves of that. For four, five years we've been settled, we've grown together. This is it."

Breen perhaps best exemplifies the growth that has occurred within the McCarthy era. Certainly he is typical of many of the products of this footballing time. Spotted and given a debut by McCarthy, he is one of those receptacles into which the manager has poured limitless faith and loyalty. McCarthy's reward is to see a player who has grown in stature before his eyes. McCarthy is always quick to defend Breen when detecting a hint of criticism about him, and the admiration flows either way.

"He's done really well," Breen says. "He's had to find players that weren't really there. We don't have a conveyor belt of internationals like England or France do. There were no ready-made replacements when Jack's team went. Myself, Kevin Kilbane, David Connolly, Kenny and others - we were all playing lower league football and Mick's come for us and developed us slowly as a squad. He found us and gave us a chance.

"We're all very comfortable now and we've grown into it and we have our camaraderie and our strength, but it's taken a lot of work to get us here."

What has got here, of course, is 22 footballers instead of 23. Somewhere along the voyage they lost their most able seaman overboard and then had to come through thewhite waters of media attention that followed. Breen hasn't yet had time to find complete perspective on the whole thing one imagines, and has compartmentalised it for later.

"I'd love Roy to be here," he says. "I'd love Mark Kennedy and Steve Carr and Gary Doherty to be here. They all played parts. They should be enjoying it. It's circumstances though. For now we have to concentrate on who's here."

Of course, who is here is a full complement of centre halves, three of them from the Premiership from which Breen has been temporarily exiled. Back in May, when they all boarded that first plane at Dublin airport, the debate in the press section of the plane was about who would or should accompany Steve Staunton. Breen, as usual, had his critics. Above in the players' compartment the man himself had few doubts.

"I've played every time I've been available to be picked. I don't want to sound arrogant, but I just have confidence. Of course, if I look at the number situation I'm going to say 'hold on, what's happening here?' I know how good Kenny is, and the seasons Richard and Andy have just had, but I was confident. You have to be that way, you have to feel that you should play."

He describes the two goals which the defence have conceded so far as very disappointing, "a couple of sloppy ones", but what abides from those games is Breen's odd mix of composure and passion. Again and again last Wednesday night he careened into Carsten Jancker and Miroslav Klose as if their presence near the ball was an insult to his manhood.

There have been plenty of Gary Breen "moments" down through the years, sometimes like when Ireland played Argentina a few years back and he brought his whole bag of concentration errors to the game; at other times he has been made to carry the can for more general deficiencies. The definitive moments, though, have been the recent ones, they are the scrapbook memories, when preparation and passion intersected.

He has a few moments of this time left and a few years of his prime to savour. He'll walk away as he has played. No regrets. And the theme music? We'll be left singing the song they love so much at Highfield Road. Altogether now, to the tune of Yellow Submarine:

Number one is Gary Breen, number two is Gary Breen, number three is Gary Breen and number four is Gary Breen.

We all dream of a team of Gary Breens, a team of Gary Breens, a team of Gary Breens..

"I'm very emotional about it, very emotional about playing for Ireland. It's difficult. I never really get nervous about games, but here I'd be distraught if my mistake cost us or anything"