Manager for all seasons

Should Kildare win Sunday's All-Ireland final, the achievement will be arguably the sweetest of manager Mick O'Dwyer's career. For nearly 10 years, he has lived with daft but persistent murmurs to the effect that Mother Theresa could have won All-Irelands with the Kerry players at his disposal.

Yet for any manager to bring a team as quickly as the 1975 All-Ireland-winning combination arrived and to keep the bulk of that team ticking over for 12 years, winning an All-Ireland every one and a half years, surely places the value of his management beyond dispute.

For a team to establish such hegemony in a championship that is structured on a knockout basis leaves no margin for error.

It is nearly 40 years since O'Dwyer started winning All-Irelands. As a player he won medals in three decades, 1959, '62, '69 and '70 and was Footballer of the Year in 1969. As a manager he led the county to eight All-Irelands, 11 Munsters and three NFLs.

His training methods were famously severe and as someone who had to travel 102 miles for every session, he had little time for those who turned up late. He conceded in 1991, in the light of publicity surrounding the injuries his players had developed in later life, that his methods could have been tempered in the light of more scientific knowledge.

Hand in hand with the rigour of his regime went an old-style patter which talked up the opposition and conceded little to controversy. A rare venture into such territory came in 1976 when in the Kerry Yearbook, he strongly criticised the Down team of the 1960s - which it must be said cost him three All-Irelands: "They fouled men in the centre of the field and won All-Irelands with it. But it was not a good thing for the game."

Kerry's style under his care was flexible. In the 1970s, they basketballed with the best of them, but by the 1980s they were able to adapt to a more direct game.

His departure from Kerry came after three successive Munster final defeats and a commonly attributed inability to let go of players who had soldiered with him for over 10 years. This attribution failed, however, to take into account the blunt manner in which some of the original team were let go.

Nonetheless his instincts were always with his players and having been greatly taken with Australia when Kerry toured there in 1970, he organised a similar tour for his own team in 1981. He also backed the players in the notorious Bendix commercial that appeared before the 1985 All-Ireland final.

That loyalty was largely reciprocated and when O'Dwyer was overlooked for management of the 1986 Ireland team for the International Rules series in Australia, at least one Kerry player declined to travel.

After only a year out of football he returned as manager of Kildare. Although there was much rumour at the time about financial inducements or even that the move was timed to coincide with the launch of his biography, in retrospect it has to be stated that he has already spent half the total time of his Kerry tenure in his new county.

The achievement of taking Kildare to a Leinster title already guarantees O'Dwyer a place in the county's annals. It has been a long and arduous process with many setbacks along the way - the surprise defeat by Louth in his first Leinster championship match and the serial losses to Dublin which blighted his first spell in charge of Kildare.

But on his return last season, after two years away, the attitude of the team seemed to change and the gutsy 13-man, first round win over Laois heralded a new era as Kildare went on to tussle with Meath over three memorable matches.

If his bequest to Kerry was the greatest team in history, O'Dwyer's legacy in Kildare is currently the more basic one of renewed self-respect, but with the possibility of more to come.