It's been caught on camera a thousand times and there's something entirely fitting about Anthony Foley always running second onto the pitch after Mick Galwey. With Galwey, Peter Clohessy and last season Keith Wood as well, the Munster dressing-room has been overcrowded with legends in their own playing days but - whisper it quietly - there's another bit of a legend brewing thereabouts. And Foley is undoubtedly next in line.

One of their spiritual leaders in any case, Foley will as surely one day assume the mantle of captaincy and fill quite a Munster void post-"Gailimh", "Claw" and "Fester". Like Roy Keane for Ireland, Foley looks set to bridge a gap between generations before Ronan O'Gara, Peter Stringer and Frankie Sheahan in turn become wise old heads.

Like all consumate team players, he's particularly well appreciated in the dressing-room. "I've never seen Anthony play a bad game," says Wood, which may betray the bias of a long-time Killaloe neighbour and boyhood friend, but in latter years it hasn't been far from the truth either.

Granted, against the Springboks last autumn he was, by his standards, a little anonymous but the French game showed his true worth again, Foley setting the tone with a monster hit on Fabien Pelous. The video confirmed his enormous workrate. He seems to have a sixth sense of where the ball is going to go and with a host of ball carries no one was more streetwise in helping Ireland to close out the game. Typically though, little recognition came his way. Not that it bothers him.

"As long as the coaches and players recognise it, I don't worry about it. I don't want it to get on top of me either."

Reviewing his career in a room adjoining the Thomond Park home dressing-room is also appropriate, for Foley was practically weaned there. As son of Brendan - not to mention the enthusiasm for the game of his mother Shiela and sisters Orla and Rosie - the young Foley was consumed by rugby from a fairly early age. "I can remember being in the changingroom when I used to go to the games with my father. I was in there for virtually the whole warm-up when Shannon were at their peak." Well, the peak before Foley junior and co came along.

"I was brought up in the whole rugby circle, going to internationals and staying in the Shelbourne Hotel where the Irish team used to stay, coming back on the team bus from Lansdowne Road, being in the Irish changing-room much like Luke Clohessy is at the moment, always around the players. So it was inevitable that I would play the game."

This writer's first sighting of him was on the St Munchin's schools senior cup team which lost the 1992 Munster final to Pres, and rarely can one boy have tried so much. It was almost heart-rending to watch.

"I learnt a lot from that day. It happens a lot at under-age level where there's one player and everything seems to go through him, and usually it's the "10" or the "eight". We were unlucky in that the scrumhalf I played with all the way up from under-13s, Thady Coghlan (son of the current Shannon president), was concussed in the semi-final. It was gutwrenching to say the least, especially as Munchin's won the last of their two cups in '82 and have been in so many finals."

He played three years on the Munster schools team, two years on the Irish schools, was on the Shannon first team within six months of his first season, and then didn't miss a game for five years.

Pretty lucky with injuries, save for the niggly ones, he simply loves to play and one senses a limit of 20-odd games per season would drive him demented. "It's been pretty frustrating for the last couple of months. I've only played one 80 minutes since France and 50 against Young Munster. My wife has commented that she's never seen me in such bad form. Sitting around and doing nothing, I just can't handle that at all, especially when you work so hard to get into the teams."

Foley realises that he is playing at the peak of his career. "They say that in your late 20s you start appreciating it a bit more. Maybe you can see retirement on the horizon." Invariably there have been deviations along the way. As he had been warned beforehand, the first year on the Irish team was great, "but then you get the `second-year yip' or whatever, except that my second-year syndrome lasted three years," he says self-deprecatingly.

He admits he lost his way a little. "I suppose most players go through it, playing the game almost for the sake of it. You don't see any light at the end of the tunnel, you start to go in on yourself and probably start going out and staying out a bit late at night, and eating the wrong foods. But once I saw where I wanted to go and set out my goals it was easy to change and go after it."

There is, he says, "no comparison" between the Foley of today and the one of the pre-professional era. "Two arms and two legs, that's about it." Another example of the sea-change is Munster's reinvented approach to away games. "We nearly had an excuse for everything. We could list the excuses why we couldn't win in France, so we wrote them up on a board one day and decided to get rid of the lot of them. Now we have a good record in France."

But most of all, there's been Olive. Behind every good man and all that. "She is my dietician, she's pretty straight in the way she thinks and it's good to have somebody like that as well. It can only help when you settle down and you're not out chasing every night. You hear Alex Ferguson talking about Dwight Yorke and you see Roy Keane calming down as well. When you have a family life you're happy."

It's been a long road back but good luck to him, he made it. What makes him tick? "I don't like losing," he says simply, with a cold smile. "I hate it. It happened to me in New Zealand with the Irish schools, in the Munster schools cup final, Twickenham last season. Days like that drive you on to make sure it doesn't happen again. And I want to play at the highest level possible. I was quite disappointed with the World Cup when I probably let myself down more than anything and missed out in '99, so one of my main goals would be to get there in 2003, and not to be a bit part, to be a major part of it. The other would be to win a European Cup final. It would have to be at this stage."

A sports nut, he's a sadly obsessive devotee of Man United (aren't they all?) and is a keen 13-handicapper. Wood observes that Foley "eats, sleeps and drinks rugby," and when he's finished he'll have to go into coaching.

"I probably will, because it's something I enjoy."

Born to rugby and consumed by it.