Still willing to hit the road, Mick O'Dwyer returns full of enthusiasm for the game, writes KEITH DUGGAN

What possesses him? Why on this most wicked of January nights is one of the most storied faces in Irish life sitting in front of a gas fire in the club room of Corofin GAA club? On the wall behind him, the bearded figure of Michael Cusack dominates a montage of local GAA figures and at the kitchen counter Tom Downes is handing out cups of steaming tea and coffee.

It is terrible out: relentless drizzle illuminated by floodlights and invidious cold. One of the first training sessions of the year is just ending for the Clare footballers. This is Burren country: overwhelmingly beautiful on clear days but tonight, the countryside seems bleak.

Mick O’Dwyer is 76 now but there are ex-supermodels and fading actresses getting millions for endorsing face creams which fail to bottle the vitality of the Waterville man’s complexion. After six decades as a household name, O’Dwyer remains curiously outside the orbit of category. “The biggest rogue,” as the late, lamented Páidí Ó Sé put it, yes.

And in November, Eugene McGee penned a column reinforcing his belief that O’Dwyer remains “without equal as a manager”. Both timing and author were significant – the All-Ireland championship had deepened the view that football had undergone a paradigm shift. And McGee, was, of course, the young manager with Offaly masterminded one of the greatest ever coups against O’Dwyer’s seeming invincible Kerry team in 1982 .

Don’t discount the knowledge, McGee was saying. Don’t discount that peerless record. In an age when All-Irelands have become notoriously difficult to retain, O’Dwyer’s bare list – four All-Ireland medals and eight national league medals as a player, eight All-Ireland final victories as a manager – seems literally fabulous.

And yet he has always remained slightly outside the establishment, always a bit too maverick and unpredictable in his views, an attitude which has probably contributed to the strange fact that he was never appointed manager of an Irish International Rules team.

He is at once talkative and elusive and even though it was often said that “Micko will never retire” there was general surprise when the Clare County Board secured his services for the season ahead. This year, Mick O’Dwyer, the most famous football coach ever, will pit his wits in Division Four football. And this night is like so many other bitter January nights he has spent in football stadiums – it is a night for the fire. So why?

“The bloody thing is like a drug,” Mick O’Dwyer says, almost as an admission that serves as the counterpoint to this week’s Lance Armstrong confession . “It is in my blood and I can’t get it out. Some people take drugs and more people take alcohol. Football is my drug.”

It is no secret that the man loves to drive, preferably at night, when there is less traffic to slow him. “I listen to the radio and have a few tapes with me as well. Clears the head.”

Valentia . . . Glenbeigh . . . Castleisland . . . Newcastle . . . Limerick . . . Sixmilebridge: he will cruise through these places at odd hours over the coming season. Turning the key in the door of the house in Waterville well after midnight is nothing new.

Home of the underdog

Decades ago, when he was immersed in Kerry teams, Clare would appear on some summer Sunday and were duly knocked out of the championship. It was just the order of things although O’Dwyer noticed that there was always several excellent football players sprinkled through average teams. And this is where he finds himself now, in the home of the underdog and preparing for the might of Cork or Kerry in the summer championship and for the twilight glamour of Division Four.

This is the conversation among the men who have gathered around Tom Downes. Because it gets such poor exposure, nobody can understand how much of a dogfight the division is. It is a hard station to leave. O’Dwyer speaks low and easily about his plans for Clare.

“Well, the most important thing is to get them to improve their game here. But Clare have always had reasonably good players along the west coast here. Hurling is still the big game in Clare as everyone knows. But the satisfaction I get out of this is getting players together and working with them and when the days will get longer, I will work on the football side of it myself and then I will know whether they are improving or not.

“But the most important thing is generating interest here in Clare . . . To get the young fellas playing the game. We hope to have a good minor and under-21 teams coming through – that may be more important than the senior team at the moment. I hope we can leave a mark here because there are big numbers turning up at underage now in all the panels.”

When Michael O’Neill and Gerald McCarthy came to Waterville to proposition O’Dwyer about taking over Clare, he had to think about it for a while. He had stepped down as Wicklow manager because Mary Carmel, his wife, was in poor health and he wanted to be at home more. She, too, had grown up in the town and was practically a neighbour of O’Dwyer’s. They were together for 56 years.

“That’s a long time,” he smiles – and was as fiercely committed to avoiding Gaelic football as her husband was to perfecting it. She was in Croke Park just once, when Kerry were beaten by Galway in the All-Ireland final of 1964. “She would have left early too except the gates were locked and she couldn’t get out. But she said she would never go back to that place again.”

And she was as good as her word: to her the game was simply 70 minutes of worry and stress and she stayed at home when the four boys began to play with the club and later with Kerry.

“She ran the businesses in Waterville. Her life was about running the businesses and having her family about her and that was it. Football didn’t matter at all.” But she understood that it was the furnace which kept O’Dwyer going and that he couldn’t really live – not in any real sense – without the game.

League and championship formed the rhythm of her life as much as his. Mary Carmel died on September 26th and her absence was part of the reason that he decided to say yes to Clare. “After she passed away . . . I suppose I had nothing much to do. I am not worried what people think or don’t think of me, to be honest. I am doing this because I am getting enjoyment out of it. If I am down in Waterville, I will be there with my club anyway. It is rare when I am not thinking about football. And anyway, isn’t it great that I can still do it?”

To be celebrated

And he’s right: that O’Dwyer is still out there on the sidelines is a thing to be celebrated. Why not? If anything, he quit playing football too early. He would have been on the Kerry team in 1975 if his co-selectors had their way. But he had decided to frame his team around the under-21s and felt that at 38, he didn’t fit into his own vision for that team.

So he didn’t pick himself, instead setting out on an unforgettable series of duels with Kevin Heffernan’s Dublin team. The tortuous nature of the Killarney training sessions devised by O’Dwyer has become the stuff of legend. He can still see immortals – Egan, the Spillanes, Páidí, Sheehy, Ger Power-– grimacing through the purges.

“They were truly tough. No doubt about it. We did a lot of wire-to-wires. That would be full two 100 yard dashes. We would do about ten on any given night. And then odd rounds of the field and reverses and forward sprints . . . and that was non-stop for a full hour. I played 18 years with Kerry and trained under Dr Eamon [O’Sullivan], Jackie Lyne, Johnny Culloty, Johnny Walsh, Jim Brosnan . . . so I had a bit out of each of them.

“But coming up to the championship, it was all football. And on the week of a game, we did very little. We went in fresh. It was a simple thing but it seemed to work. So first of all, I got them fit . . .but then we played a world of football. All through the summer. It was simple backs and forwards, 12 a side. Move the ball first time you got it. I still believe in direct football but you adapt as you go.”

And that has always been vital to O’Dwyer’s enduring success in the game. There is a chameleonic element to his willingness to adapt to the natural changes to the game. He has always been a keen follower of other sports, from rugby to baseball to football.

Years ago, he met Matt Busby at Old Trafford through Billy Behan, the scout. And when he was with the Laois team at a function in Manchester, he was invited along to training at the Cliff by Fr Martin, the team chaplain. Alex Ferguson made them tea and they had a bit of a chat. “He just couldn’t understand the Gaelic footballers in this country – the time they put in and not getting a penny for it. That fascinated him.”

He sees no mystery in Ferguson’s seemingly effortless ability to reinvent and re-imagine several distinct United eras since 1986. “He kept bringing in the right players at the right time. He has Van Persie there now and he has made a big difference this year. He has kept Giggs and Scholes and they are nearing 40 . . . so age doesn’t matter with him if he thinks they are good enough. I have always preached that. Fellas leaving our game now in their early 30s . . . it’s crazy.”

When O’Dwyer decided to leave Páidí Ó Sé off his team for the 1988 Munster championship against Cork, the Ventry man was so disappointed that he didn’t speak to O’Dwyer for a full five years. No anecdote demonstrates the depth of respect and affection and volatility between the two men as perfectly. You’d have to care about someone deeply not to speak to them for a half a decade. O’Dwyer and Ó Sé spent half their lives at once conspiring with and out-foxing one another.

Inevitably Páidí followed O’Dwyer into management. In 1998, O’Dwyer’s Kildare beat Páidí’s Kerry. And in 2004, Páidí’s Westmeath team defeated O’Dwyer’s Laois.

There was a moment in the drawn final which caught the essence of the relationship. Dessie Glennon had just scored an important point for Westmeath and on the sideline, Páidí was living the match; “wired to the moon” in his own phrase and excited and optimistic and worried all at once.

Open book

Páidí’s face has always been an open book and when he turned on his heels, busily and urgently, he was surprised to see O’Dwyer just a few feet away from him. Páidí’s expression became instantly respectful and he nodded at the senior man, a courteous acknowledgement in the maelstrom and he made to pat O’Dwyer on the arm as they passed by.

When O’Dwyer heard of Páidí’s death on December 15th, he couldn’t believe it. He still can’t. It makes as much sense as the sudden disappearance of Mount Brandon: something elemental has been erased from the landscape.

“It was a terrible upsetting thing . . . because he was a man in the prime of health to me. He was a powerful man in every sense of the word. It was a big shock when I heard he dropped dead. I do think that is the way he would have wanted to go, to be honest. But there was a good few years left in him. And what he has been doing for football – getting 48 teams to play in his tournament – was unbelievable. He went all over England and I think to the continent as well. You know, he had great charisma. That was proven in the funeral.”

Then O’Dwyer looks around the room. “Páidí spent his term in Clare as well of course.” And of course he did: Clare was Páidí’s last team as manager. They are never too far away from one another.

Tonight in Corofin, the mood is good. Tom Downes is joking with a few friends. Michael Cahill, who is training the team this year, sticks his head in the door. He is drenched and cheerful. Everyone, he says, has been boosted by having O’Dwyer on board. “You see it when he walks into a café here or before games – people are in awe,” Cahill says as he gulps a cup of tea.

“The players probably were too for the first few weeks. But then you get down to it. The first thing I was taken with was his enthusiasm. Everything was focused on what we will do . . .”Having Cahill run the weekly training sessions is a relative novelty for O’Dwyer.

“I am a real manager now,” he laughs as the cars begin to leave the ground in a procession of floodlights. All of Ireland is behind curtains. “The wind and the rain never bothers me,” O’Dwyer says as he heads out into the night. Anyhow, fewer cars were on the road on nights like these. He should be home in good time.

RTÉ was broadcasting a documentary as a tribute to Páidí Ó Sé. That fierce energy and passion and restlessness that made the Ventry man unforgettable would come crashing through every television screen in Ireland. Mick O’Dwyer hoped to watch it when he got home from training.