About a week after the Galway hurling final, the people of Clarinbridge realised that the winning of a first county championship does not, sadly, bring dispensation from mortgage repayments or work duties or from simply cutting the grass. After the astonishing, last-second culling of Athenry - Daragh Coen's free ended a match for the ages on a scoreline of 0-18 to 2-11 - it took an hour and a half to clear the winning dressing-room. Keith Duggan looks at the man behind Clarinbridge's march to the Connacht title

The mania in that cooped-up unit was just a preamble to the euphoria which threatened to take a permanent hold on the community and was still palpable when John McIntyre gathered the players for their first training session as Galway champions. They were giddy. So the manager got them to huddle together in the empty ground and bellow "Champion-ees" as loudly and badly as they could.

"I suppose it was kind of a funny thing to do," he chuckles now, "but I felt it was important that they got the fact of winning out of their system and also that they fully acknowledged it and celebrated it. I examined the experiences of teams like O'Loughlin Gaels of Kilkenny, who were off playing challenges a week after winning their county title. And I was torn between admiration for their sense of purpose and a question mark over whether they fully absorbed what they had achieved."

McIntyre is one of the unsung cult heroes of modern hurling. He is a rare breed in that he is a Tipperary man in voluntary exile in Galway and has immersed himself in the sport there at club level. A loquacious analyst of the game with The Connacht Tribune, of which he is sports editor, and Eamon Dunphy's radio show The Last Word, hurling knowledge flows from him.

He has been, on occasion, stridently critical of Galway hurling during the lost years from 1993-'99 and there was a distinct school of thought within the county that believed McIntyre was the ideal candidate, given his unique perspective, to audit and right the county woes. That hasn't come to pass and McIntyre was looking forward to a period of solace when Clarinbridge came calling last year.

"It was certainly not my intention to be managing a team this year. But Billy McGrath came round to me and I was impressed by his appetite and commitment, it was apparent that he had done a lot of preparation. There would have been a perception that Clarinbridge had ebbed as a major force, that they peaked a year too early and had come and gone within the space of three years."

McIntyre, by his own admission, had grown a little disenchanted by his managerial experiences with Loughrea, where an exhaustive training schedule had yielded little. He wasn't sure if he had the stomach for another winter. But there was a magnet out there sucking him back. The Athenry Monster.

"In 1989 I was with Sarsfields when we beat them and since then, they have gained revenge by the bucketload. I have lost three semi-finals and a final to them." And they loomed large in his imagination as they ate up three successive Galway titles before taking imperious steps to a pair of All-Irelands. To greater Ireland, they were a breath of fresh air, to Galway hurling clubs, they were the great oppressors.

"You'd wonder if anyone could stop them and then I said, well, if anyone can, I want to. Maybe it was a bit of desperation."

Stop them he did. McIntyre laid out a clear set of principles at Clarinbridge. The absolute rule was that there be no shirking, from anyone. He is 40 now but he ran every training drill with the players, covered every blade of grass they did. "That way, I knew which of them were hiding," he laughs.

And when the day of flags and car horns arrived, McIntyre dipped into the recesses of his Tipperary days, reliving his own joyless county final in 1984.

"We were told to take the field looking at the ground, don't look at your family, keep your head down. And I can see the sense of that. But I wanted our players to enjoy the occasion. You know, these are the days you live for. I wanted them to look at the crowd who had come to see them, sing the Anthem, enjoy it. And I wanted them to hurl. So to be honest, I got a tremendous kick out of that win, just witnessing the outpouring of jubilation."

His candour is liberating in a GAA environment that has lost a lot of the old joy. Clarinbridge's cursory Connacht win over Four Roads puts them against the new darlings of the Munster game, Ballygunner.

"People say this is bonus territory for us. I don't see it that way. This is a golden opportunity to reach an All-Ireland final, one that may not come around again."

"There is a parallel to be drawn between Ballygunner and ourselves. But this is a team that has beaten St-Joseph's Doora-Barefield, Toomevara and Blackrock. We would have been apprehensive facing any one of those sides. I am aware that, from our perspective, the record of first-time champions in the All-Ireland series is not very healthy. Take the example of Adare or O'Loughlin Gaels. Also, Ballygunner are used to Semple Stadium. We may spend the first 20 minutes looking round at it."

That is hardly likely though. Semple Stadium remains McIntyre's spiritual home and he will naturally communicate his ease to the team. The worries they encounter are likely to be less cerebral. For instance, what to do about Paul Flynn, the Waterford flier addicted to scoring?

"Put five men on him. And another five on Fergal Hartley. That leaves us with five to win the game! Ah, no. Look, they have wonderful players, no doubt and like ourselves, they have taken a major step forward this season. As a game, this one has a lot going for it."