A Day In The Life (Beatles 1967, by the way).

Belfast and the morning has broken misty and moist. Brian Kerr shapes out of the Forte Crest Hotel, all woolly hat and anorak. Drinks in the scene. "Yis all in fighting order?"

His players are loitering on the brink of the bus. The backroom boys are loading up the boot like it was an aircraft carrier. The driver is getting his instructions for later in the evening when Kerr's boys play Northern Ireland in the first leg of a qualification play-off for the European finals.

"Listen," says Brian, "we're supposed to be there an hour-and-a-half beforehand, but that's time enough to be leaving. Where's the official observer from?" Pause. "The Faroe Islands? He's not going to be making a song and dance." And that's decided. The bus duly pulls away out of Dunmurray towards the Malone Road and training. Kerr and his confederate Noel O'Reilly sit up front. "I used to know this city," says Brian. "Ma and Da came from here and every summer we'd come up. I know the little houses, but with the motorways now I don't know how to get around it any more.

Frank and Margaret Kerr came down from Belfast and settled around Drimnagh way. Frank tailored for a living and coached boxing for pleasure. He passed on a sense of the dapper and a genius for teaching to his son.

Outside it's Belfast. O'Reilly and Kerr have an appreciation of travel and its opportunities, which is rare in the football world. One sight sparks remembrance of another. The Malone Road triggers talk of big houses in Cape Town, the training ground sparks a conversation about Jerusalem and so on.

The roadway to the Queen's University training ground is called Dub Lane. "Ah, home," says Brian quietly to himself as the nose of the bus passes the corner. A minute later the body of the bus is manoeuvred around the corner. People are shouting the name out. Jaysus, Dub Lane. Dub Lane. Very nice. The bus draws in above the pitches and the hydraulic door hisses open just as the last line of the tape spools off in the cassette machine. Oh my name it is Sam Hall, chimney sweep, chimney sweep, rasps Ronnie Drew.

On the pitch, 60 seconds later, Kerr is pacing, head down, determination pasted on his face. The training ground is about three feet narrower than the pitch which tonight's game will be played on. He gets some cones and redraws the border.

Then he gathers his boys together. He has decided to tell them the team now. Only fair, he told them what Northern Ireland's team would be last night. Now fresh faces blink at him hopefully. Does any manager like this bit?

"This wasn't a handy one to pick lads," he says from beneath his green woolly cap, his eyes dancing around catching theirs, "and even if you're not picked I want you to be in the spirit of the thing. We all need each other tonight lads."

And quietly he goes through the team. "Dean in goals, Colin right back, Kevin and Jason, centre backs, alright - which of you likes playing on the right by the way . . . "

This is the last training session before the game. Time for tinkering, time for varnishing the setpieces. He spends an hour or so in tutorials. Richie Baker of Shelbourne makes the little decoy runs. Shaun Byrne thumps the frees. He lines up the stringy centre halves and the big strikers to meet the corners from headers. Different choreography for every situation. You could say anything to Brian Kerr, he doesn't make people fear him or shrink from him. His trick is that people like to listen to him. You can never guess the next tangent. Bobby Charlton couldn't coach footballers. Brian Kerr has been doing it since he was 14. He can link any vision with the words and make it interesting.

"Do you hit it with your left as well Trevor," he asks Trevor Fitzpatrick. He absorbs the assent, computes it into all the situations he has already devised. Trevor is new, a big posse from Dun Laoghaire are coming to see him play tonight. Kerr has been breaking him in carefully, rooming him first with Shaun Byrne, whom he knew at West Ham, then putting him in with Gary Doherty, who he will be playing up front with tonight.

Then there was the quiz. Nothing loosens them up like the quiz. Noel O'Reilly devises the questions, keeps their heads busy.

Kerr sorts out the teams out in a certain way. "There might be one culchie with a Leaving Cert and one Dub who never sat an exam in his life and one in between fella with an English accent. We give them different questions, some of them set up so fellas have to know the answers. Gets them talking and arguing.

"Who is bottom of the Scottish first division. The fellas playing in Scotland have to know that. That brings them in. Or the one last night: Name the United States manager in the World Cup, the clue is it has biblical collections?"

He thought everyone would get Steve Sampson, but half of them come back with Moses or Ed Moses. Still. It's not University Challenge.

BBC's Jackie Fullerton is pacing up and down the far touchline. The players watch him twitchily, like fretting wildebeest eyeing a hungry lion. They aren't confident enough yet to make their own decisions when it comes to speaking to cameras. Ger Crossley is an obvious angle for the media pack. The Celtic player comes from Belfast and might be wearing a different jersey tonight if things had been different. The northern media have been stirring up some controversy on the issue already. Kerr is keen to defuse the situation, steering Crossley away from the wolfish Fullerton and doling out his own time and bonhomie freely.

"Wasn't me who first picked Gerry Crossley anyway," he says with a chuckle when the bus door is closed and Crossley is tucked away down the back. "They'd only be gettin' it up for us anyway."

Back in the Forte Crest, the background music which wafts through the lobby might have been picked for Kerr. An eternity of '80s hits thread their way through his conversation. A discussion of GhostTown by The Specials leads to a debate over the merits of The Blades' first album which leads to a soliloquy on the death of the old TV Club in Harcourt Street and so on.

Music trivia is a speciality. Ian Dury and the Blockheads' first hit?

He orders tea and sits back to talk, about old times with the boys. Paul Weller's first band? He pours, handing the plate of biscuits around, too. The bass player with Graham Parker and the Rumour?

Music and football.

"Moxy," he says, describing an ancient performance which he rated somewhere between manky and poxy.

"Yeah, moxy."

"Remember stabbers," he says to John Fallon, the kitman. "Little butt of the cigarette that you could only hold between your thumb and your forefinger. `Those medals they used to give us were like stabbers'. Nobody says that any more."

"He could put a cross in, a real put-that-on-your-miraculousmedal cross . . ."

It could be corny, all this remembrance of times past, but Kerr has a wryness and a sense of irony which keeps it spinning and fresh. This is the time of his life. No need to dress up the past.

THE TALK turns to England, of course. Who's making it over there. Who's coming back soon. Who's never going to make it. One of the under-16 kids at Nottingham Forest has been on tenterhooks. One of the under-18s has been filling Noel O'Reilly in.

"He says to me that the young fella is `getting tellt' today. That's what he says. `He's getting tellt today, Noel'. I'll give him a call later, maybe. See how he's going on."

The endless queue of young fellas willing to take the tightrope walk that is English football is a matter of mixed feelings for Kerr. The kids are going earlier, which he doesn't like, and they are getting used up quicker and more ruthlessly, which he doesn't like either. He tells people to keep their kids at home until as late as possible, but for many of these kids football is their shot . . .

One young buck is back from England with his tail between his legs after what papers would term an incident in a nightclub. The spark quickly goes out of young fellas like that. Six weeks ago this kid was breaking into first-team football, pranking the manager by laying out wet kit for him and now he is at home and maybe untouchable.

Brian Kerr remembers Derek O'Connor from the last Youth World Cup. Oco they called him. Oco took sick during the last Youth World Cup, before the US game. They visited him in hospital in Malaysia, the infirmary cooled by oar-blade fans whirring quietly and Oco sitting up in crisp linen, half-zonked. "I want to play."

"Can you play?'

"Sure."

So they got him to the game in Alor Setar and Oco was white as a sheet. Sure you're okay, Oco? Ah yeah. And they're warming him up tossing footballs at him and Oco is moving to the left, moving to the right with the stiff alacrity of Frankenstein with rheumatism. "I says `Oco, you might be alright in the slow motion replay, but let's hope they're not coming at you at normal speed'."

But he goes out and plays the game and saves the day. The punchline is that he gets booked for wasting time in the first few minutes because he has a little shuffle in his run-up to the kickout. Sixteen minutes from time he's sent off for the same kink and misses the next round anyway. Oco was with Huddersfield then. Star of the show. Now he's with the amateurs at Bradford Park Avenue.

"Goes to show you never can tell," says Brian.

"Chuck Berry," says Noel quietly.

You never can tell. For Nigeria he has a better, more experienced team than he has brought anywhere. He also has a better draw. On this morning in March he is confident of winning the tug-of-war with English clubs to get his players, too. He should be whistling. "You don't know how it will break. You get the best fellas and the thing doesn't take off as a group and you're thinking I'd sooner have ordinary fellas who'd die for each other. That's half the secret, getting them to work for each other. You'd look at who we had in Malaysia and say we should go further next time. You can't say 'til they've played a match or two. That's the beauty of it."

At lunch, Noel and Brian and Declan the physio get a table in the corner. "Has to be the same table we sat at last time we were here," says Noel, "we won from that table."

They've won from a lot of tables. Indeed, they lost only twice last year in the space of 32 matches.

"What's the grub like?" says Brian.

"Chicken or pork or something," says Declan the physio.

"Buffet?" asks Brian.

"Yeah," says Noel, "what was her big hit?"

"Who?"

"Buffy Saint-Marie."

"Aw, give us a minute and I'll think of it."

"I saw you having a word there with Podge?" says O'Reilly to Kerr during dinner.

"Yeah. I just told him he was brilliant."

"He is brilliant. And you're right. Kid needs to be told." Podge is Padraig Drew, a lank-haired winger who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame when Everton told him he could be the next big thing. His year at Goodison went badly, though. The English club squeezed the dove too hard instead of letting it spread its wings. He's back at Home Farm looking for a transfusion of confidence. "That's all he needs," says Kerr. "He was a year over in Everton and never got anything but this in his ear." His line of fingers jaw up and down on his thumb.

"Same in his school," says Noel. "They said to me `look at him, he's useless', and I said, `no, he's better than the rest of what you have put together'. They didn't even understand that."

Players are what keeps Brian Kerr going. He's fascinated by them and their possibilities. He knows the shape he likes players in each position to be, knows the colours they need to have on their palate. A guy can look like a centre half or he can look like a middle-y fella. Kerr will seldom guess wrong once he has seen the physical appearance. Players keep coming to him. He's had an e-mail telling him about a player in Dortmund with Irish parents. There's a big bruiser of a centre forward at Blackburn he has his eye on. His father is a Dub. Come at it the right way and well . . . "the young fella can score goals". He has just missed out on a kid whose mother was from Sligo. He had a hunch and didn't go quickly enough on it. The boy's father was a Kiwi who played for Sligo Rovers in the '60s. Kerr saw the name in the South-East Counties league and vaguely remembered the Kiwi marrying a Dublin woman. Stored it in his head. Next thing the kid was picked for the English under-16s and scores twice on his debut. Now he'll never know.

It is not long after 4.30 in the afternoon in a little room upstairs in the hotel. The team are shoehorned inside to talk about tactics. While the boys have been napping, Noel O'Reilly has been drawing the battle plans.

Shaun Byrne is dispatched for the second time to get Michael Reddy of Kilkenny and Conor O'Grady of Sligo Rovers who haven't shown up just yet.

"I told them already," says Byrne. "They didn't believe it was time to come down."

"Jaysus," says a streetwise Dublin voice, "D'Unbelievables play for Ireland."

O'Reilly and Kerr play the next hour like a double act. Xs and Os on white paper is a little abstract for football tastes. They have to keep the banter coming. Kerr accuses O'Reilly of filching the blue and red markers. O'Reilly counters that Kerr is a chancer. The kids forget to be nervous as O'Reilly flicks over the sheets. Here's how we defend when they have the ball and Richie Baker is working the right wing, here's how we drop back for a free kick to the left of our area, here's how we line up for a corner when they leave the two centre halves inside . . .

Kerr runs down through the Northern Irish team. He knows as much about them as he does about his own players. Show him the outside and he won't beat you. Let him know you're there and he doesn't like it. Run at him, he's clumsy going backwards. Play the diagonal ball out to Richie, it'll baffle them . . .

"Any questions, lads?"

Silence.

"Right lads. It'll be a short journey home tonight."

The Oval is half an hour away and it is soaked in Belfast gloom. In one corner of the ground is a huge sign with the word JESUS on it. It's about the only thing that isn't dowdy or crumbling. Brian gets the team bus to pull up near the dressing-room door and ushers them off the bus under the 60 watt bulb at the doorway and down into the dressing-room.

"Settle down boys, it'll be a long night," is the last thing you hear him say before the door rattles to a close and another rip-roaring chapter begins. Stories for Boys (Uhm, U2 1980??)