THE time is upon him again. The week stretches onward, its contours as familiar to him as the road to Thurles. Monday training. Tuesday work and a certain tiredness. Wednesday wondering ...

He knows the signs by now and watches for them. Sited here in a training game, looked straight in the eye by a selector, chased down by a toiling young fella. He worries about it, he really does.

Wednesday and wondering. Father Tom calls out the team. Nicky at full forward. Good. Thursday for work then and tidying his thoughts.

The time. Championship time. When it comes to the championship the most exuberant hurler of our age is a hypochondriac. His form never seems just right. Feeling a heaviness here, a little self doubt there. Nagging his mind. Not right. Yet he's always ready.

Once in his flash, fleet footed, prime he felt no nerves. He got over that though. Now he frets all week like a spotty debutante. This week, as his thoughts wandered, he looked at his career and pondered how it might be neatly bookended with Walsh Park in Waterford at one end and Walsh Park in Waterford at the other.

"The first time I knew I might be going some place in hurling was when we won the under 21 All Ireland against Kilkenny in Walsh Park. That was in 1981. I've only played there the once since. Jesus, I'd hate for it all to finish there."

Back in 1981 you'd not have put him down as a dog for the long hard road. Nobody skimmed the ground like Nicky did, nobody scored goals like Nicky did, nobody bespoke the lost glamour of Tipperary hurling quite like Nicky English did. Fifteen years ago you'd have said that the fair haired boy in the corner would be chopped and sledged into early retirement, that the glamour would be sucked away by the black coated doubters muttering distrustfully about fine day hurlers. Anyway what do you get out of him but a couple of goals a game when he feels like it?

Unreliable see.

Fifteen years, yet here he is. Ken Hogan, who played in goal that day in 1981, has moved onto be a senior selector. Others too. Bobby Ryan is gone. Donie O'Connell. Joe Hayes. Fellas who you'd look up to. Fellas who you'd rely on when things got tough and time was running short. Fellas who'd pull through in the last reel. Nicky looked around not so long ago and it was just himself and Pat Fox left from the lean years. "I just thought to myself. Well who's next?"

Championship week. Fretting. Who is next? So much change. Babs doesn't do the driving anymore. Babs is off doing missionary work somewhere in the midlands so Nicky drives the 100 miles or so to Thurles and back two nights a week and at least once on weekends.

He gets in early in the morning so he can leave the office at 4.30, sweats it out in traffic for the best part of an hour before he swings onto the open road. Gets back at around midnight. Works the next day and finds himself "fit for nothing" the next night. Recovers and does it again.

You listen to Nicky English talk about his hunger, talk about the place he comes from, talk about the need to do it all one more time at least and you wish Roy Keane could be there. He'd get some sense of his own privilege knocked into his sappy young head.

"The ideal life for me would be the professional sports guy thing," says Nicky, "just looking in from the outside that seems like the thing to be for me. Maybe there's a lot of heartbreak that I don't see but to be able to make your lifestyle out of sport, to train in the morning and rest in the afternoon and not worry about making your living for the other 40 hours a week, not running around doing a day's work every day on top of sport, not wondering how good you might have been. There doesn't seem to be too much of a downside to that."

Yet if the end is near he'll miss the grind of his hurling days.

He'll pine for the stomach tightening tension of the championship. A decade and a half of it and it still wraps itself around him like a fist. The thought of it gets him talking.

This week? I'm apprehensive to be honest with you," he says. "Next Sunday will tell a lot about myself. And about the team.

"I don't know what's there in terms of how I'm going with the form or how much hunger there is left in the team. I know that last time we played championship, against Limerick last year, when it was put up to us, we lay down. We didn't want to know."

"It's the championship. We should always be up for that. It's hard to explain. I looked at Limerick last week and they were fiercely hungry. We have to show that hunger. When the real pressure comes on it's older guys like me who have to start winning in their positions. We have to find that. Carry ourselves on.

"I wonder what's still there. We've become a great team for making excuses. We lost last year because we didn't have Mick Ryan and Paul Delaney, we lost the year before because we didn't have John Leahy and Nicky English. This year where's Pat Fox?

"In the bad days when we lost we said we weren't good enough. That's why you lose. Not good enough.

"Coming out of the league final Tipperary people were saying that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to lose, the championship coming up. I know what they mean but maybe we should be bursting to win every match. When we won the league in 1988 we were thrilled with ourselves. Now losing isn't such a bad thing. We shrug it off."

ABOUT his own hunger he has the odd doubt but when he weighs it all he knows his edge is there. He's heard the whispers which suggest that Nicky has suddenly been cursed with feet of clay. Only one place to test that notion.

Early in the year he went skiing and cut his left ankle badly.

Treacherous over the years those ankles. He cursed his luck and crossed his fingers. Not long afterwards a challenge with Galway loomed one bad, wet Sunday. Nicky got out of bed and couldn't walk.

Assumed that his ankle was actually broken.

"I was feeling a bit of pressure. Tipperary wanted me to turn up, see if I still had anything at all. I wanted to go myself so I got into the car and decided maybe it would loosen up on the journey. By the time I got there I couldn't put the foot down on the pedal.

Father Tom you're not going to believe this but.

He togged out anyway. Tried one sprint and collapsed. Ended up in Vincent's for the next week with a blood infection and a course of antibiotics to plough through. He got back playing and training, fighting his way through a fog of tiredness until one afternoon in work the ankle went again and three more weeks were consigned to recovery and drugs.

"By the time we played Laois there in the league I thought I was in trouble. I was surprised to get on. I did badly. Felt sluggish all through. Against Galway it was a little better but not much. I wasn't fit. Since then I've been working. Plenty of scope for improvement. I'm getting there. Sunday will tell."

He suspects an ambush tomorrow. The way Nicky English tells it things are stacked for Waterford really. Last year the game between them was over after 10 or 15 minutes. It felt like a draught of the good old days. Fox dipped in for 2-4. Nicky had four points. All that was left for entertainment were a few moments of costly spite.

So Waterford have had a year for brooding. They have some good players. For proof just look at last year against Galway in the league quarter final, just look at their under age pedigree. Lads that have been beating Tipperary all along. They have their home crowd pressing in on them. They'll have one mighty go at it.

"I don't think it's the end now but come Sunday night or Monday morning I might be looking at it. Good luck Nicky and thanks for your trouble. Leave your jersey in the bag as you go out. No testimonial.

"It's been part of my life for I don't know how long. On the pitch in Thurles, just being there, I still love it as much as ever. As years go by you get a bit apprehensive. A young fella makes mistakes and he has next year. I've got other worries. I have a bad game or two and people are looking at the door expecting me to walk out through it. Comes to us all."

Lately he's not been happy with his hurling. Generally and specifically. The vision of him which the mind preserves is of a blurry streak of blue and yellow bearing down on a hapless goalie with a flailing defender chopping at him from behind. Sometimes he clips the sliotar short handed to the net. Sometimes he kicks it. Always he turns with the roaring in his ears and the grin on his face. Performing that quintessential Nicky English feat was when he first noticed the company of that enemy which visits us all. Age.

"Pace was always such a part of my game. It's strange when it goes. Getting away for goals, say, I can't do it anymore. I'm trying to get away and I feel like I'm going at the same speed as ever but everybody else has got faster. That's how it feels. The legs are going the same just everyone else is faster.

"You always hope the management will be honest with you. Tell you that you aren't in their plans and not to be wasting everyone's time. Sunday would be a terrible finale. Hard to take. The downhill is steeper than the hill you went up in the beginning."

He has fought against the slope of his own decline by dismantling his game. He still practices alone a couple of nights a week just like when he was a youngster in Cullen beating a ball against a wall in a little football town with no GAA pitch. Self tutored, he is still changing that which needs altering.

"I've had to work hard on my first touch. I'm slower so I have to compensate. I need to get the ball to have a chance of scoring. I've had to learn to be patient too. Last year I noticed that I was spending more time trying to win the ball.

Hunting it really. Going into crowds of players hunting it. I've got to rely on touch now where I used to have the pace.

HE had that pace in the bad years. In those early hype free hype free days he pushed the envelopes of hurling possibility furthest. Three of his six All Stars came in successive seasons in the early 1980s.

He won five successive Fitzgibbon Cups.

Scant consolation in times of heartbreak. In 1983 Waterford inflicted a 24 stitch wound to the inside of his mouth trying to stop him. Four points ahead in 1984 with six minutes left and Cork beat them by five points. Nicky lost the ball to Dennis Mulcahy late on and the move ended in a Seanie O'Leary goal. Almost wiped the lads out. That's championship. The next year he had 2-3 against Cork but still came home a loser.

Hurling is changing. He wonders about 1984, if Cork would have done it if they'd had a second chance coming. He knows the desperate, aching, championship hunger that those grim years left his own teammates with. The comebacks of 1991 for instance. When Munster finals were last chances and losing meant extinction.

He worries about extinction himself now. He used tell everyone that Dennis Mulcahy was his toughest opponent. Now they're all so tough it's hard to tell one form the other.

Anyway, not many people ask any more. Nicky moved to Dublin in 1989 just before the breakthrough. Glad in a way to have some distance. Back then Tipperary was consumed by the quest for the grail.

"It doesn't mean as much in the city. All day, all the time back then, it was what we talked about. It was an obsession. I wonder if hurling is talked about as much in Tipp now. I don't think so."

Dublin clubs offered to spare him the long drives to Lattin Cullen club games. Offered him a jersey and a chance to have his ankles chopped in the capital. He stuck with home.

"They know what you're like at home. No unrealistic expectations anymore. In the early days up in Dublin I used to laugh about the club that I'd stick with them. Now I'm stuck with them and they're stuck with me."

"What you are brought up to regards a goal means more in the end than anything you'd achieve elsewhere. I've one county medal in Tipp hurling and that was at junior level a few years ago in 1992.

"That was as gratifying as anything else. We'd won football medals but that was the first hurling medal.

"Some Sunday mornings it's hard to roll out of bed and come back that night with a cut on the head and explain to people the next day that you got it playing for Lattin Cullen the day before.

"Six hundred miles a week in the car. It's tough sometimes but you know you'd miss it when it's over. It's what your brought up with. I remember as a young fella seeing Tipp win the league in 1979. I was thrilled. The first time I'd seen Tipp win anything.

THEN they lost to Cork by a goal in the Munster semi final. I thought it was the end of the world.

"I never thought I'd get to play, or for so long. You don't take it for granted. When the championship comes around and the buzz starts you remember how lucky you are. You still want to play and win and keep it all going for another while."

Fifteen years and for now the championship still brings it's eternal rhythms. Still the same old song. Hope to be picked. Hope to win. Hope to play well. Hope to live again. Even for those kissed by greatness. Even for Nicky English.