Incongruous as it may seem, they have If by Rudyard Kipling on the toilet walls of Adams Park, home of Wycombe Wanderers. An hour in the company of the club's impressive manager, Lawrie Sanchez, however, and the urinal poetry does not seem so strange.

After all, if you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs and blaming it on you is one reasonable definition of a manager, while if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue is probably another.

Thus, when Sanchez, a key figure among the infamous Wimbledon Crazy Gang - its "barrack-room lawyer" according to Bobby Gould - and the man who scored the winner in the 1988 FA Cup final against a great Liverpool side aiming for a double, described himself as "detached" despite his integral role in that Wimbledon era, you realise that here is someone who has long had an intuitive understanding of what it takes to be a manager. Maintaining a distance comes naturally to him.

That he went to university to study management while still a player at Reading in the late 1970s, and that he took his coaching badges the summer before that 1988 Cup final, merely adds to the impression that Sanchez's thinking was detached from your average modern footballer's from an early age. It is a concept with which he is content: the outsider inside.

Proof that he is different; yet that at 41 Sanchez is still identifiably Wimbledon is evidence his detachment never crossed over into arrogance, real or perceived. So he can expect a warm welcome this afternoon when Wimbledon arrive at Adams Park to play for a place in the last eight of the FA Cup. Old faces, old tales, old handshakes.

But Sanchez's achievement at Wycombe is to bring the club something new: never before had Wycombe got past the third round of the FA Cup, never mind been participants in the fifth. When it is remembered that two of the club's previous managers in its eight-season existence in the league were Martin O'Neill and John Gregory, you get some sense of what Sanchez means to Wycombe.

O'Neill, for one, is fully appreciative, sending Sanchez a fax before Wycombe's victory over Wolves in the last round. "He's been here for a game or two and been very complimentary," said Sanchez of O'Neill. "Martin's a god to the fans here."

O'Neill is now a god in Paradise, of course, yet Sanchez worries that no matter how well he does at Wycombe, the fashion being for "big name" managers means he may have a long wait before he is given the responsibility of working in the Premiership. "I've always wanted to manage," he said, "I'm not one of those players who came to the end of their careers and suddenly decided on it."

He could take Wycombe there, it could be argued. But, given that Wycombe are smaller in English terms than Sligo Rovers, where Sanchez had his first taste of management almost seven years ago, if Sanchez's personal ambitions are to be fulfilled then a call from a Premiership chairman will be required.

He does not appear hopeful. "In no other industry do they say: `Oh, you're a big name, come and manage that'. There are specifics to football, but a football manager should be able to manage - manage. Because come half-time, your first teamtalk, you've never done it before, you've got 11 people looking at you thinking: `Come on, sort it out, that's what you're paid to do'.

"I mean, it's well-documented John Barnes lost it in the dressing-room at half-time. Viduka said he wouldn't go back out. What do you do? Do you clock him, or do you go to the chief executive and say `Viduka won't go back out, what do I do?' But that's what management is about. "Management is about organisation and I've always been organised. The fact I went to university showed I was organised. University isn't about what you learn, it's about how you think. It's about structuring your thoughts. Thinking.

"But in life you'll find there are certain glamorous people, that none of us are perhaps, who are always going to have the luck. Sam Allardyce, he left Notts County for Bolton because he knew he would never be appointed a Premiership manager because he wasn't a name. The only way he could be a Premiership manager was if he took a team there.

"The thing now is that at the top flight you can be the figurehead manager, the PR manager. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. Vialli did it and won trophies at Chelsea. But Bryan Robson, his first ever coaching session was with England. John Barnes at Celtic . . . I'm not knocking Alan Shearer, but players of my ilk aren't the golden ones."

Sanchez did not appear convinced by the suggestion that there seems to be a shift away from that policy. But Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier worked from the bottom up, as did O'Neill, as did Alex Ferguson. Peter Taylor is another example; Glenn Hoddle started at Swindon Town.

That was where Sanchez's playing career ended in 1994. Nicely, his last start was against Wimbledon, just as his first for Reading as a 17-year-old under Maurice Setters had been against the club he became synonymous with.

And after Swindon he got the call from Sligo. Willie McStay was joining Tommy Burns at Celtic and Sanchez leapt at the chance. He did well. "I've great fondness for Ireland," he said, "loved everything about it. It was the first time I'd been back since before the Troubles, when I used to go to Belfast a lot.

"I keep in contact, and its disappointing to see Sligo got relegated. They've got to look back and see Willie McStay, myself and Steve Cotterill as a golden era really. Perhaps the board, or certain members of the board, could have backed us more than they did. There's no knowing what we could have achieved over there."

Having been to see Sanchez when he lived in Tonaphubble Lane and he spoke of the beauty of the west, it can be said he is a more relaxed, less austere man than he was then. The death of his wife from breast cancer three years ago must have affected him profoundly, and he now brings up their son on his own. But there is also the passage of time and the accumulation of experience. Despite what he says about big names, he is an admired young manager and much of that stems from his increasing self-assurance.

It is a strikingly different demeanour from that expected from someone in the Crazy Gang. But then he had his doubts about that all along. "At times it went too far," he said of some of the "stunts" Wimbledon staged. "One or two people got injured and we all had to be seen to back the club view when, as an individual, you thought: `I'm not happy with that'. At times I had to bite my tongue. We were wrong to back it, I regret that I didn't speak out at certain times."

But that time has gone forever, he argued. "Stan Collymore's considered a maverick now because he let off a fire extinguisher in La Manga. If he'd burnt La Manga down, then he might have some street cred. But the game's different."

As is Lawrie Sanchez.