DON'T want to do this interview. Don't want to do it. We've known Mickey Whelan for a long time without him knowing us. Back in the days when we were marooned in the creek between minor football and adulthood, Mickey Whelan used to take us for physical training on muddy midweek nights. Lots of us. Massive, grinding, humourless sessions in the watery dark of the Oval out in Raheny.

Years later, in another life, we informed him that we had once sprinted, turned and sprinted to the sound of his voice. He looked us up and down, said: "I don't think so." Then he just walked off.

Then he became manager of the Dublin football team. First day out Cork beat Dublin and we asked where Jason Sherlock was. Mickey went off like a firework. Whoosh!

Don't want to do this interview. Have never known what to make of Mickey Whelan.

To understand Mickey Whelan you have to look at where Mickey Whelan comes from. Once back in St Vincent's, when we were pimply and awkward, we played an under 15 B semi final against St Maur's of the north county on a windswept Good Friday afternoon.

We lost by a point in front of a viewing party made up of the club's elders. Lar Foley, whom we worshipped, ushered Kevin Heffernan into the dressing room afterwards. Heffo thanked us for our efforts and announced that some day some of us would make good senior B players. B players? God had decreed it would be so. Nearly 20 years later it transpires that, with one exception, God was right.

That's Mickey Whelan territory. He grew up in the arms of Clanna Gael but moved to St Vincent's as a young adult and absorbed the culture of winning which the founding fathers had developed into a grim art. Back then Vincent's were relentless winners. Possibly the best club football team of all time.

Kevin Heffernan was Whelan's colleague, friend and mentor. Brian Mullins would later be his soul mate. Tough, old style Vincent's men. Growing up you thought you could never fill their shoes. Growing up you knew that they knew that you would never measure up.

Mickey Whelan has touches of them both and he has a splash of American brashness thrown in, some boisterous belief in himself that sets him apart. Mickey knew and he would tell you that he knew.

One more thing. Mickey Whelan doesn't much like the media either.

Don't want to do this interview. Have to do this interview.

IT'S Saturday morning and the All Ireland champions are out and about in Santry. Things have changed since last we were here. Mickey Whelan has made his mark.

Old bones have been resurrected. Joe McNally who peaked, can it be, 13 years ago now, is at full forward. Niall Guiden, who was blackballed out of here 18 months ago, is nipping up and down the wing. Eamon Heery, back after his self imposed exile, is here.

More. Damien O'Brien has returned with the same bundle of promise he carried this time two years ago. Paul Clarke, the team's top scorer from play last year, banished to the reserve team. Out in the corner Jason Sherlock is toiling hard on the foothills of Mount McNally.

The team's philosophy has altered, too. No more studying the percentages. If the team has a motto for the year it is this Bury It.

Mickey Whelan was a forward all his days and he likes nothing better than seeing a move consummated by a good shake of the net. "Bury it!" he roars, anytime somebody bears down on goal. "Bury it!"

Sometimes the team has entire "bury it" sessions when they are permitted only to score goals. They had one against Longford a few weeks ago when they buried it nine times.

As often happens to Dublin on the doorstep of summer, they look curiously out of sorts this morning. The shadow team beats the bright boys. They look slower and less intense then before. McNally's bulk, not Sherlock's speed, dictates the pattern.

"Well," says Mickey Whelan afterwards, when he is ready to talk, "what did you think of that?

"I thought they were poor."

"Did you? I wondered what an outsider would think.

Bad start. Mickey has about as much use for my opinions as he has for a chocolate teapot.

"They're hitting McNally instead of playing it out into space."

"Did you think so?"

"Well yes."

"I'm not so sure that was the pattern last year and I'm not sure that this year we are hitting Joe. Up to today, we haven't been hitting Joe. It's interesting that you think we were hitting Joe.

This is when Mickey Whelan is at his most impressive. Talking about football and the way he wants to see it played. His work here is about paring the ambitions of this players.

I don't set any preconditions about how the game is played. I want our best players on the ball and for the man in the best position to get the ball. And if you want to go by a guy, then go by him. I want them to use their initiative."

Mickey Whelan has perhaps the toughest job in football. Keeping alive a team that maybe peaked last autumn. It would be fair to say also that many people think Mickey Whelan's face didn't fit. More to the point, his arrival heralded a major change of approach for Dublin players. Old structures were dismantled. It's fair to say also that Mickey Whelan is acutely conscious of the whispers. Some players have suggested that training this year has been too easy. Mickey would argue that it just felt that way. A few weeks ago he tested them for speed and endurance. Same as last year. Better even.

He begins diplomatically. Then breaks into a canter.

"They were successful last year and if something is not fixed you wouldn't want to break it. They are taking the same mental discipline into the thing, I encourage that. What I'd like to see is a little bit more initiative. Training has changed, too. We do everything with the ball. It's easier if you have a ball.

"I think Pat O'Neill did the right think going. He honestly didn't feel there was another All Ireland in this team. I don't think the media felt there was, even though they are now building it up. If you looked at that team in the final it was steeped to win it. It was creaking in certain places, had been there for six, seven eight years missing out. Getting there, but not doing it. Chances are they were lucky to get out. I came in and said I am going to have back ups here and there. If this guy can do it fine, if he can't, I'll put somebody else in there."

To that end, he has taken some big risks. If a full back kicks Joe McNally around one afternoon this summer, the fingers will point at Mickey Whelan. Ditto if Niall Guiden sinks rather than swims, or if Mick Deegan struggles again at corner back.

"Yeah," he says disdainfully, "people will judge me anyway. I don't care. I can't stop people making judgements. People will want me to fail, will want to be able to say I told perhaps he will fail, and perhaps we will all say that we told you so. On the other hand, perhaps this cocky, tough minded, positive thinking Vincent's man is just what Dublin needs this year. In the year after an All Ireland, a new voice and a winter of having to prove themselves all over again may have been no bad thing.

One of Whelan's projects for the year is Robbie Boyle, the great enigma of Dublin football. The fair headed Boyle has it in him to be one of the great footballers. Mickey Whelan has set himself the task of mining that potential. This morning Boyle has scored five points from play while being marked by Paul Curran. Whelan surveys the work in progress.

"Robbie? He has to impress you. He has another gear. I had a talk with him the other night. `The one area you lack,' I said, `is consistency. That's mental. If you do it once you have the skill to do it always. The only thing that stops you is physical or mental. It's not physical. It's focus'.

"He's a dreamer, but he does things brightly and powerfully. He's a guy who won't start this week, but I'll be disappointed in myself if he's not a star as we progress through the Championship. That will be just down to me and him.

And what about McNally? If Whelan can coax McNally into producing the same scoring rate in inter county football as he manages at club level, he will have succeeded where others have failed. As the totem of the new regime. Joe McNally's fate seems inextricably linked with Whelan's.

Again Mickey Whelan entertains no doubts. Fatness wasn't the issue with Joe. Fitness was.

"Have you seen American football?" asks Mickey "Well, the Refridgerator could cover 40 metres in 5.5 seconds. Faster than anyone here. If you want to judge a guy just because he's big and heavy, go ahead. He's tearing club teams apart. He has to be in this team."

When he talks about his football and his players the skies above Mickey Whelan's head are always blue. Dublin blue. And, despite himself almost, he loves to talk. He is one of the clannish old Dublin school, yet he has a garrulous streak running right through him. Explaining football decisions to the sensation seeking dullards in the media isn't his idea of something to do. Nor was it Kevin Heffernan's, but Mickey will argue the toss with most people.

What Mickey can do also is explain the environment he is a product of. He tells you shy he is the way he is.

"In my time, St Vincent's were the best beam in the county. Maybe in the country. Maybe I got on that team because I had the right mentality. Maybe I was influenced. I'm the sort of guy who likes criticism. I actually open up discussion around criticism. I am prepared to learn.

"I would have been pals with Heffernan 41 my life. Our wives palled around together. We influenced each other. We would have gravitated towards each other. We had our pre game situations. We went to the pictures on the nights of games to relax. I was on the Dublin team at 19. That was an influence.

"Heffernan would have been a playing colleague, a mentor, then an adviser and a friend. He had a great influence on my professional career, too. I remember we won an All Ireland and not long after, driving along in the car, he turned to me and said `what about your career?' The medals hadn't even been presented.

"I was a fitter at that time. He told me. Go to the next stage. Find what you want to do. Sit down, think it all through."

Mickey Whelan did just that. He decided on a career in physical education and did a remarkable thing. He took his wife and two children to the US at the age of 30 and started a new life as a student. Hard times, but the adversity and the challenge brought out the best of him.

"I did a social science degree, a BSc in biology, BA in health and physical education and an MSc in sports science. My wife and I washed down apartments at different stages just to live over there. Later I got scholarships, but she did that. You think this is a pressure job? Try doing that."

America left its mark on his character. He came back having shed his inhibitions like an old skin. Took up his football seriously again. Won a club All Ireland with Vincent's in his late thirties. He loves the American flair for accentuating the positive. Never say never.

"Go into a bank manager over there having failed in three business and you have a great chance of getting a loan. You've failed, but you've learned, you have the courage to do it again. Here in Ireland you are banished. That's it."

The stigma of failure is something he will resist to the end. He is so self confident that he is almost fanatical in his self belief.

He suspects that anything other than a repeat All Ireland this year will see him branded as a loser and already he is preparing the battleground. That thought brings the conversation around a sharp bend and into difficult territory.

"There'll be months of media aggro if we lose, but while you're doing that I'll be working to make sure that it won't happen again."

"Do you really think that? Do you think we're all out there with nooses?"

"Think so? I know so."

Mickey Whelan didn't exactly come out of nowhere last Autumn, but put it to him that his appointment surprised a few people and that at least two of those people were under the impression that the job was theirs and he reaches the end of his short tether. Media humbug. That's how Mickey Whelan sees it.

"People asked what had I done. Well I won four championships in Louth. Three in Dublin, with Vincent's, brought them to a club All Ireland. The last championship they won I was fucking in charge of it. The one before I was in charge of it. The one before that I was in charge. The three before that I was on it.

"I won everything in Gaelic football at Third Level, won everything at Third Level in soccer. Did anyone sit back in the media and say, `Hold on, how did this guy, who everybody sees as a Gaelic guy, go to Dundalk soccer club and become the coach of the team that won the National League'. No, it was what has he done in the game?

"What was I to do. Say: `Hold on, you're all wrong'. I managed a team in Japan. I gave courses in America for the FAI. I was the chairman of the GAA coaches."

There is a pause. Can't think of the next question to ask. Can't even think of the last question. Mickey fills in the gap.

"And something else. There was nobody else offered this job despite all you read and was written. I'm telling you. Nobody else was offered it. I read in the paper that a lot of them thought they had it and a lot of them, thought they were offered it. They weren't. John Bailey told me they weren't. He (Bailey) told you. You didn't believe him. Do you think I'd let myself into a situation like that at my age, with my experience?"

He is flowing freely now. No time to slip across the tracks bearing a soft question with so many carriages of woe coupled together and hurtling past. He is speaking very loudly, but not exactly shouting. Not in the full bloom of fresh temper, rather giving an airing to old and time worn griefs.

Well, how exactly did the job offer come about?

"I'm not going to teal you that Do you think Heffernan would let himself into it? Do you think he'd let me walk into it. I'd never be in a fight unless I was a winner before I went in. A lot of that stuff comes from people who claim they were offered that job."

But Mickey hold on, hold on, hold on. Since you've brought it up, I know people who think they were offered the job. They aren't fools. They weren't hallucinating surely. I know people who say they were offered the job.

"Go away!" he says, with the sort of heavy sarcasm usually reserved for the excessively credulous.

"Well, they weren't. Pat O'Neill said last year (`94) that he was stepping down whether they won or lost. Not this year. Last year. The first thing when a mike was put under his nose he said that somebody had to keep Dublin on top, that this was not the time to make that decision. Even though he'd said for a whole year that he was definitely going and you all thought that he was definitely going. Well you weren't the only people who thought he was definitely going.

When it comes to the media, Mickey Whelan's bonnet is suddenly swarming with bees. Apart from one gentle crack in these columns about the last of the summer wine, it's hard to see his point. Yet he goes back to day one, his first game, in the League against Cork, with the litany.

"Anyone who thought we could beat Cork, and you were probably one of them, doesn't know anything about the game. How could you guys? There wasn't one media person who said Cork would beat Dublin. I lose respect for the media when that happens. Apart from all the celebrating, the weight of the world off their shoulders and being out at night, they had a new man in three days before. What do you think I was? A bleedin magician?"

Of course Mickey didn't lose faith in the media that weekend in November. At least two papers, The Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune, tipped Cork to win and gave cogent reasons for doing so. Mickey never had the faith to lose. Hostility towards the media is an ancient reflex.

"The old management team was in place when they beat Leitrim (the county's first League outing). Were they shit lucky to beat Leitrim in Croke Park? What you should nave said was that Dublin were garbage had been in charge of that game, I know that you'd have said Whelan was garbage. I've done so much psychology that I'm thinking that far down the road. They are the facts.

"That's what sells papers. Are you going to say in all honesty if Westmeath beat Dublin that `I talked to Whelan, saw him operating, he's a good guy, he did a great job, it wasn't his fault Dublin lost'."

"Listen, what's fairness got to do with it? Are you joking me."

I don't think you read it in our paper anyway.

"Did I not."

No.

"Good. To be honest, I didn't read any of them. That's not condemning them. It's a defence mechanism. I'd say my wife read it. I said to her before I took the job, there is going to be an awful lot of shit. You cannot go through any career without negatives happening which aren't your fault. I said I can live with it. How about you? She said she had no problem.

"Another thing. There was never discontent in this panel. They knew and I knew I'd fuck them out. First guy I found that I thought had a bit of a hang up - I wouldn't care how good he was - management, good management, would dictate that he went."

He pauses for breath and suddenly he leaves the business of the media behind him and becomes Mickey Whelan, the football man, again.

The talk moseys on for while. Why he insisted on a three year tenure. Why his selectors are just the guys he wanted. "This trio won't be fighting each other," he says. "We ain't going to split."

He speaks warmly about Brian Mullins, whose path could cross his later in the Championship. Mullins was in town two weeks before the National League final. Whelan picked his old friend up, went out with him up to his parents house, stayed and had a cup of tea with the big man and his father. Dublin played Derry the next day in a challenge out in Portmarnock.

That's the context in which Mickey Whelan is best judged. When he drops the front, he speaks emotionally about some of the great Vincent's men who have died in the past year or so, of the huge wrenching gap their passing has left in his life.

He talks about the late Des Foley and his brother Lar, about Mullins and Kevin Heffernan, and the way through the years they have leaned on each other and the club. "That's what friends are all about," he says.

On Tuesday evening he named his first Championship team. Raised quite a few eyebrows, too. He won't have cared. If it all goes bad, it's back to the football men he will turn. A singular man with his self confidence undented and undiminished. A brash, positive thinker rolling along where the skies are blue.