Another working day slips away and Martin McHugh points the car from Donegal towards Cavan town. Tonight is an overnight stay. His two young sons are fidgety in the back seat, the eldest wearing a blue Cavan jersey, the youngest too small to wonder. One hundred or so miles later he trundles over the mud and grass and gravel of Breffni Park. The spanking new stand lords it over the lush recently-laid pitch. Breffni Park is evolving into a fitting monument to the past in a county which considers itself the home of football. McHugh's team are evolving on parallel lines. A monument to the future. An escape from the past.On his first night here, with disappointment in Donegal behind him and uncertainty in Cavan ahead, he drove here early and found the gate open. He wandered out on to the pitch, scabby and worn back then, and looked around at the green hills and cracking concrete."I said to myself `this is mine for the next three years. Better make the most of it'."He has. Two Ulster finals, an AllIreland under-21 final and a top grade league position are the bounty delivered by a man whose self-confidence is as wondrous as Cavan's storied past. The secret that night and ever since has been to ask questions of his players, not himself."From the start, from that night, I always thought I was good enough. I never questioned myself. That's why I went for the Donegal job at the time. I would hope I'm a better manager now, but I never questioned myself, maybe that's being big headed, but I just didn't."He knew plenty of the Cavan players whom he faced in the dressingroom that night. He had brushed up against them in inter-county games and rubbed shoulders with them for Ulster. Perhaps they wondered just who McHugh thought he was to be standing before them, laying down the law, telling them what sort of manager he was going to be. He didn't care. He was looking around and picking out the players whom he admired and wondering if he could find enough youngsters to match them. The recent history of Cavan was miserable, a long, slow stagnation during which the county failed to win a championship game in eight years.

They went from Division Three into a League quarter-final that year and got beaten without disgrace by Derry. McHugh came back to the losing dressing-room with the cheers of Cavan people ringing in his ears and found his tired players smiling happily with their backs to the cool of the dressing-room wall. He took a flame thrower to their contentment."That I couldn't believe. I told them there and then that if anyone was pleased with themselves they could get out there and then. I hate that attitude, that if you play well and lose you've a lot to be pleased about. I had to come in and shut the door and tell them that anyone who was happy with that performance could get out of the dressing-room. They had no business being happy losing. I'd rather win with a bad performance than lose with a good one. Never in my life in football was a good performance good enough. It doesn't matter how you win as long as you win."They won two championship matches that summer and got to an Ulster final. The self-belief returned. It was easier for him, he reckons, because Cavan's prior history had been so abject it just needed one championship win to set the confidence coursing through the county again.The team motivates and focuses itself now. McHugh scarcely has to open his mouth during training these days. He reckons he hasn't shouted in a dressing-room for over a year now.Tonight, in Breffni Park, the rain is pouring down relentlessly, rattling off the roof of the stand and creating a constant hiss on the grass. The players emerge from the dressingroom area, each wearing an Umbro rain jacket, with the county crest and county sponsor's logo emblazoned fore and aft, each wearing Puma boots, each looking mean as a junkyard dog. Every player is handed a brand new pair of Umbro gloves worth £50 a pack. "Hi boy, they look like something astronauts would wear.""If you never caught before you'll catch with them on ya."Without a word from a mentor they begin their work. Not unusual. They have an appetite for business. Cavan travelled to the National Fitness Centre in Limerick early in the year for a battery of tests. The testers were astonished at their level of fitness. The players travelled on to Ennis and made a good weekend of it. Business first. Pleasure second."Take the week after the second Fermanagh game," says McHugh. "We trained on the Monday night down here. On Tuesday night, after a decision in the dressing-room, they met on their own in two different groups, one in Bailieboro, one in Cavan town, and trained on their own. On Wednesday night we trained in Ballyhaise together. On Thursday night they went to the swimming pool together and then on Friday we had a team meeting. I don't have to talk to them about drink or attitude. The next step for them is to get over a hurdle like Sunday."Ah Sunday.

Derry, big-boned, implacable and trained by another man who points his motor out of Donegal every evening. People make Derry the roaring favourites because they dismembered Tyrone last time out. In Ulster, the cognescenti reserve the right not to be surprised by a Cavan win, however. As Brian McEniff told the television people when previewing the final: "Derry should win, but the wee man is amazing."People look at Martin McHugh's sides and wonder admiringly about how street smart they are. The maker's mark. When McHugh played in the All-Ireland final of 1992 he came up against Keith Barr, confident, brawny and exuberantly physical, the sort of player who might wrap McHugh up in a bundle and hand him back at full-time. Barr got booked in the first five minutes. The wee man had a day of days.His team carries the same potential, the same ability to turn your strengths against you. On Wednesday night they practised their longrange shooting for an eternity. Tomorrow, though, they are expected to run at Derry, take the frees when they are offered, stretch the defence into uncertainty."Ach," says McHugh, with a laugh when you tell him that he has a fine reputation for scheming, "that's because they see me on the telly. They're blowing me up for their own purposes. I wouldn't worry about the other team at all, the most important thing is trying to get the best of out my own team."I have to make the decisions before the match. There's a lot of managers after the match, but I have to make the decisions before the match. You're writing on Monday, or on the telly on Sunday night, or talking in the pub on Monday, and that's great, but for me it's decisions beforehand and spur of the moment stuff during the game. Everybody can be wise afterwards. It was a gamble the last day putting Damien Reilly back in and it worked. It could have gone against me and I'd be back in Donegal now with everyone here thinking I was mad."Reilly's surprising contribution the last day against Donegal, when having been withdrawn from the corner back spot after 17 ticklish minutes, he was inserted again at corner forward for the final 21 minutes, has made tonight's team announcement a delicate business. McHugh speaks about his ruthlessness often enough that one suspects he takes pride in it, but the player in him knows the feeling of dread which befalls a player as 15 other names get called out."It's a tough night for me," he says. "Mickey Graham got man of the match the first day for us against Fermanagh. The next day we took him off half way through the second half and put Damien up front and we've left the team the way it finished the last day. It's hard, it's tough. There's three fellas not lining out at all. I feel for them, but that's a manager's job. If you're not able to do that there's no point in being a manager."McHugh, tucked underneath a green woollen cap which hides the grey hairs and makes his look boyish again, speaks to his players a couple of times in the course of the evening. From the circle, with McHugh at the centre, there are great waves of laughter from time to time. If, as many suspect, McHugh is getting ready to say goodbye to Cavan there is no evidence of it here. It's a situation with a playwright's sense of drama built into it. On the eve of his greatest managerial challenge, McHugh is acutely aware that the job for which he has the greatest yearning is lying vacant back in Donegal. You expect him to seek diplomatic immunity and dodge the question, to evade all talk about the vacant Donegal job. He's in buoyant humour, however."Let's be fair about it," he says, "my three years in Cavan are up whenever we lose in the championship and we have to sit down and look at it. We're not thinking of losing, though. I would hope my time won't be up until the third week in September and I would hope that the players are thinking the same."I haven't even thought about the Donegal job. That's just it. It's understandable that people are ringing and asking, but I have one focus. I believe we'll win on Sunday and take everything from there."It's hard to believe that he hasn't thought about the Donegal job, but he refuses to be swayed from the assertion. He gets 25 to 30 calls a day about Cavan football, then there is work, driving, family and training. Time for thinking about the Donegal job is spent sleeping in his bed, he says."I suppose when I went for the Donegal job and didn't get it I was hurt. I felt that I was the right man for it. Everyone had their own ideas. You'd like to manage your own county. I felt I was deeply enough involved with Brian McEniff. I used to train with him. The five-man committee set up felt differently. I had made up my mind to go into management. Cavan came in and I gave it a go. "The fact that I didn't get the Donegal job when I went for it was a big thing. If I had known beforehand that I wasn't going to get it, then I maybe wouldn't have went for it and might have played on. It would have been unfair to PJ (McGowan) and unfair to me to have stayed. If I played badly people would have said that I wouldn't play for PJ. If I played well, PJ was pushing me hard and putting me under pressure. If he dropped me there would have been all things read into it. I think it was the best thing, the best for everybody. It would have been hard going into a dressing-room with the other lads."This year McHugh drew another barrage of rumours on to himself by transferring to a club in Cavan, then switching back a week or so ago to his own club Kilcar in Donegal. McHugh was going to play himself in a Cavan jersey. McHugh saw the opening in Donegal and switched himself back pronto.Machiavelli Beag McHugh."Ah yeah," he says, shrugging. "Always rumours. Cute McHugh. Scheming away."I signed for a Cavan club this year. I wanted to play with the team, maybe in McKenna Cup. It's hard to beat, getting in through them and seeing what they are like on the field. It would be important for me in learning about them. I could feel things on the field that I wouldn't feel off the field. That's the reason I did it. I played a couple of challenges. It didn't do me any harm or them any harm and I learned a lot."So then the Donegal job comes up and I'm back. Well I switched back because the club was always good to me and backed me in everything and we have lost six league games in a row now and could go down and that would be bad because we have a good young team. We've a league game on Saturday night. I'll play in that. It's important to me."I miss playing for Donegal the most when I go to see them in the first round of the championship, looking at the lads out in their jerseys, getting ready, and all the buildup behind them, and the grass nice and green. I miss that, but life goes on. We're all still friends. The 1992 Ulster final with Derry is on TnaG next Thursday and the whole team is going to Anthony Molloy's pub to watch it. That'll be a night."He talks on, speaking fondly of Cavan and the county's perception of itself, which he has come to share, as being the home of football. "You know when I came here first I looked at myself like a player in the Premiership in England, who stops playing and lands down in a third division side managing it. That's the way I looked at it, but when I came here and got to know the place I realised that this was a good set-up. I had a lot of confidence in myself. I came here certain about the way I thought the game should be played. The players responded and became their own leaders."Tomorrow he will be in Cavan early for breakfast with his players. They've played three times in Clones already this summer, so the journey will be comfortingly familiar. Just about everything that has been said needs to be said. He knows the message he is trying to impart. Days like these make you or break you.He remembers playing in an All Ireland semi-final against Meath in 1990 and he was taken off. "It was the first time ever that I was taken off wearing a Donegal jersey. I always said that if I got back to Croke Park that I would try to redeem myself. I was always worried that I would never get that chance. The point is that footballers are judged by how they perform on big days. That's how it is. That's how you are remembered. There's nothing sadder than seeing a fella who can perform well but just doesn't."Maybe it will all end tomorrow and McHugh will pass on from the home of football to the place he calls home. Either way, on the big days, when personal headlines are written, he has delivered.