Car doors close with an echo around the village of Dunsany, where Meath are training, and on the radio, Tom Dunne of Today FM is playing the classic Strawberry Fields, a song that always sounds best at dusk.

Dublin City feels further removed than the 25 miles that separates it from this idyll. Graham Geraghty is the purpose of the evening visit out to the Boyne valley. A hopeful request was submitted for a half-hour in the company of the blond. This is not an open session; Seβn Boylan would be well within his rights to ask you to leave.

Instead, he winks his greeting and resumes his counsel on the far sideline, hunkered down with his selectors, as sage as Sitting Bull.

It is a quiet privilege to observe the Meath players among their own as opposed to the way they are on the swelling passions of match day, when the TV cameras seem to magnify them, making them biggest, baddest, best; somehow unreachable.

On the training fields, though, it is the humility that draws notice, the ordinariness. Skirting around the front lines is Geraghty, blond and wearing a corner back's geansa∅. He is darting, stopping, breaking again, keen for the ball. Always looking.

"The funny thing is," observes selector Colm Coyle, "that he is not the quickest. Line him up in a 100-metre race and he wouldn't win. But I have never seen anyone with such explosiveness over the first five, six steps."

Explosive is the perfect adjective for Geraghty. Isn't that how he always appears to us on the marquee Sundays of August and September? For much of a game, he can meander through a match subdued and sombre only to suddenly present himself as the games defining force. A long ball and a green-blond blur and there is Geraghty, lofty and smiling, winning again.

"Graham has this style of playing that makes it all look so effortless to him," says Coyle. "It can look as if he isn't all that interested, sometimes. But it masks the tremendous amount of work he puts in to arrive at that. For instance, the improvement in his kicking of either foot has been astonishing over the past few seasons."

A fractured observation overheard years ago in a pub comes to mind. "Fecker has an engine on him like a Ferrari," someone said. And it is true that he glides across the ground; a machine, programmed to score.

"Back at the start of my career, it is probably the case that I was always looking to notch up a few scores, get a couple of goals or whatever," Geraghty notes later. "But now, it really doesn't matter to me. So long as Meath win."

Geraghty is 28 now. When he isn't out on the pitch, he is to be found back in Boliver, "pulling pints and trying to keep the peace" in his pub, The Swan Inn.

"We had great crack there during the Westmeath games because we are right on the Westmeath border. So a fair few punters would come in between the games and there would be good old ribbing going on.

"The first time we played them, maybe we didn't fully give them the credit they deserved. And they really had us on the ropes. I remember in the last few minutes of the second match saying to Ollie (Murphy), 'this is it, we need a goal here or we are gone'. And thanks be to God he stuck one away."

Those fascinating games against their neighbours offered a perfect synopsis of what we understand Meath to be. Infuriating, magical, narky, stubborn, brave and never dead. Bram Stoker could not have invented ways to kill them.

Geraghty also embodies all of these characteristics. His explosiveness is two-dimensional. For every score of true beauty comes the flip side, the enraged barracking at a referee, the petulance. In 1995, 1997 and 2000, he had suspensions slapped upon him for various incidents.

When Meath, the champions, crashed against Offaly last summer, Geraghty was in the stand, serving two months for felling Derry's Kieran McKeever in the league final and verbally abusing the linesman on his departure. These are the incidents that have helped shape the general viewpoint regarding the forward, setting a notion that for all his princely gifts, he is trouble. Up close, the picture looks different.

"It is something we have been impressing upon Graham to work on, getting annoyed with refs," notes Coyle.

"What people don't realise though is the extent of the abuse that he gets on the field. This is at both club and intercounty level. I have witnessed it repeatedly and believe me, there are few people that could put up with it. So sometimes he just gets so frustrated that he just can't contain himself. It is something he is aware of and tries to curtail but because he doesn't get the protection, the situation becomes impossible."

Still, the track record weighed against him when the Australia Incident blew up on the International Rules tour of two years ago. During a heat of the moment exchange with Damien Cupido, a local youngster, Geraghty warned him off with the words "you black ****."

Three words and his world was thrown into turmoil. The referee informed Ireland officials that the words were tantamount to "racial vilification."

Although the incident passed unnoticed in Australia, it ballooned in the Irish media and threatened to develop into an embarrassing diplomatic incident for the GAA. After a period of indecision, Geraghty was eventually dropped for the first Test.

"After the thing happened, I apologised to Damien Cupido and thought that would be it. Then (tour manager) Albert Fallon told me it was going to be in one of the papers at home and I said I didn't mind. But I suppose I was disappointed with the way it was reported. And it was confusing also because there was nothing about it here and my wife and family was calling up wondering what was going on. I didn't really know. It destroyed the tour in a way for me but things settled down after the first game and from the team's point of view, it was a brilliant trip."

For all the comment and print about the Australia Incident, one vital aspect was overlooked. Geraghty. Crazy as his utterance may have been, it seems beyond doubt that it was without malice. Only the most naive would deny that many athletes trash talk, firing insults based on physical characteristics.

Geraghty's fatal mistake was that he crossed the taboo, the no-go area: race.

"And if you knew the guy," says Coyle, " he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. It is simply not an issue with him. If the other fella had been bald or fat, that would have been the insult. I felt sorry for him, it was unfortunate."

He became public property for those weeks and it is safe to say the fallout left its scars. "I am just sorry the whole thing happened. You know, I have been called plenty of terrible things on the field in the past, probably will be again."

For about a year afterwards, Geraghty stayed silent, trying to move on. After a time though, he began doing one or two interviews "just to put my side of things out there and try and move on". Time passed. Meath's shocking departure from the 2000 championship left Geraghty with the novelty of a free summer and an offer came to play in the Gaelic leagues in Chicago.

He smiles at the recollection of those easy evenings, kicking ball in front of a few hundred spectators with Wolfe Tones, a warm breeze drifting in from Lake Michigan. He savoured it, just another Irish kid laying bricks or pulling taps.

"Niall Buckley (of Kildare) was out there then and he was like the main man of the GAA scene in Chicago. But people treated us like royalty over there. It gave me a chance to just get myself together, recharge the batteries and have a think about what I was going to try and to this year." The result of the soul search has been one of Geraghty's finest summers to date.

His partnership with Ollie Murphy has been a key story of this remarkable championship.

"They work hard at developing it, yeah," says Coyle. "But there are times when they do something and on the sideline, we just shake our heads. The understanding they have is a form of telepathy at this stage."

Geraghty just shrugs when asked to analyse it.

"We've been playing there for a while and we are good friends also. When you have a bit of camaraderie with a fella, it can help. The timing is everything. When you make a break now, you have to get the ball or the entire movement breaks down. Thankfully we have brilliant ball coming in from the likes of Trevor (Giles). But that is the hardest part, getting free. We are always working on that."

He admits that Sunday has a special feel about it. He has long admired Kerry and this encounter may give him the chance to watch one of his heroes up close.

"Although to be honest, if Maurice Fitzgerald doesn't play at all against us, all the better for Meath," he laughs. "I just think he is a super player. Even this year, the point he kicked against Dublin kind of sums the guy up."

Fitzgerald always held a fascination for him, along with Colm O'Rourke and Jack O'Shea, although it saddens him that he has never had a proper conversation with Fitzgerald.

Tomorrow, the Graham Geraghty game face will be back, as if to assist us. Sullen and then smiling then aggrieved and maybe enraged.

At some point, though, he will get hold of the ball and will see the possibilities flower a split second faster than the other 70,000 people present. His marker may catch the glint in his eye. It will be a look not of arrogance, just absolute conviction that he is about to express himself in a way that will force us to marvel, a look that says "let me show you who I am, let me take you down".