Not yet weary of these worldly bars

Keith Dugganfinds Kildare manager Kieran McGeeney upbeat as he reflects on his time with Armagh and his bruising managerial early days.

THE NOONDAY bells ring out from St Joseph's church in Phibsboro and outside the Mater hospital, the taxi men sit on their car bonnets, chatting under warring skies. All morning, there has been talk of thunderstorms in Dublin. Under the awning of a nearby café, Kieran McGeeney pushes a plate of scrambled eggs away and enjoys the novelty of actually sitting still for half an hour.

It is a momentous weekend for the Armagh man. This afternoon sees the latest chapter in his turbulent first season as Kildare manager, when his boys go into the lion's den against a revitalised Limerick team. And on Sunday, Armagh play the Ulster final replay in Clones. Whatever about the weather, this is the calm before the madness, all right.

He whiled away a morning visit to the Mater for treatment to a knee injury by reading a book by Pat Reilly, the famed basketball iconoclast. He hopes to go hit a heavy bag at some stage over the day. It is pure coincidence that McGeeney is wearing a white tee-shirt redolent of his new football county, but it is a neat illustration of how completely he has altered his sporting life.

The Lilywhites and McGeeney: it was a strange, inspired sort of union and it may yet produce some of the thunderclaps promised by the skies above us.

But as McGeeney talks animatedly about the trials of being a manager, you have to confess it seems odd he no longer belongs to Armagh. It seems downright strange that McGeeney won't be leading those orange shirts behind the brass band.

Win or lose with Kildare today, he will not drive to the old market town tomorrow, or stand outside the Creighton or walk the big hill up to St Tiernach's with his family and he won't be a face in a crowd for the television producers to pick out. McGeeney is courageous but every man has his limits. No, he will be there in ghost form only.

McGeeney played with Armagh for 18 years, long enough that the more seasoned players will probably see visions of him when they are trying to move the ball through the light-footed torments from Fermanagh. He will be there in spirit. But he will be watching from under the sofa.

"I can't watch. I can't," he admits with the lopsided grin that comes readily in real life but was rarely in evidence during the brightest Armagh years.

"And I have thrown my hat in with Kildare now and this is my priority. I will be shouting for the boys on Sunday. But it is difficult. I was 18 years with the senior team. Mum and dad will be there, my brothers and sisters will all be in Clones, but no, I will wish them all the best . . . but I couldn't listen to fellas I know getting abuse. It is hard to remove myself. John and Tony (McEntee) were there at the draw and I know they found it quite difficult. It is just trying to make the break easier."

He could be out there. He concedes that. The lazy assumption about McGeeney's swift exit from Gaelic football was he left because Joe Kernan left. But he claims it was nothing so rational or clear cut, more of a gut instinct he believed he had to follow, difficult as that path was.

"Physically, I would have no problem playing county football. Although people were telling me I should be retiring since 1998! I always said I would know when to quit. And airy-fairy as it may seem, life tells ya. There are wee things that point you to certain decisions. My time was up.

"And there was stuff written about why I left, but I cannot reiterate how big a person Peter McDonnell (the current manager) was in my football career. I completely admire him. He has great strength of character.

"So we never actually spoke about whether I would stay on and it was into the summer that I decided to stop. And from last August to Christmas was probably the most difficult time in my life. And people can . . . I am going to go through tougher things and I know there are far more important things than football, but just pulling away from all that . . . the idea of abruptly stopping something you enjoyed and took very seriously . . . is hard.

"I was focused about football in a way that I wasn't about the rest of my life. And it took me a while to achieve a balance. Now, I haven't said, 'right: it's party time'. It will come. It is just not happening in one big block."

After Armagh emerged as a nouveau force in Gaelic football, all dark professionalism and glittering scores, a mythology grew up around Kieran McGeeney that both amused and annoyed him. He was habitually name-checked as the embodiment of the new model army of football players, totalitarian in approach.

His hulking physique was submitted as evidence to his obsessive dedication: McGeeney was supposed to be to football what the young Robert De Niro was to method acting. Even flexing his arms to lift a cup of coffee it is clear he packs formidable guns but he rubbishes the notion that he bulked up out of proportion in later years.

"After 2002, it was said I bulked up too much but I was heavier before that year. The jerseys were just bigger and baggier then. Armagh were good trainers but look, we were like any team. We had five or six guys who went above and beyond. Every team has those guys.

"My philosophy is: when you train, it has to be for a reason. Guys come up to me in a gym and ask me about a programme. They want bigger arms, bigger legs, whatever. So you ask, 'Why - are you getting pushed off the ball, are your legs going?' 'No?' 'So is it a beauty contest type of thing?' Like, people have different builds. I was always kind of strong - you have to be for centre half back. It wasn't about [presenting a menacing image] that, not at all.

"Half of it was taking the tackles and not feeling like you had to strike out. You don't want midfielders running down the middle and you met guys who were two stone heavier than you. But then in 2005, Joe wanted me to be a man-to-man marker and I went down to 13 and a half stone. 'Course, people thought I was even heavier. What can you do?"

He was sent off twice in his career, both on second yellow card infringements. But he acknowledges that for all the accolades attributed to him, he has been labelled as a 'cynical player', the most sly of all criticisms as it implies a kind of underhand approach to the game, a mentality utterly contrary to his image as the solemn, iron-willed leader of men. If people want to believe that, then there is nothing he can to about it. He has a clear conscience about his record on the field.

"The only person who knows is yourself. I think few players I have marked would say there was much devilment out of me. Yes, I hit hard going for the ball but more often it was me that was getting hit. I will answer back but I don't talk at players.

"Look, I could name you 20, 30 experiences that happened to me long before I had a profile. Players do things they regret on the field. But I would like to see the examples of things I have done. People's perceptions of what they see on the field are so different to what is happening on the field."

That truth has been hammered home in his short life as a manager. After years as the seemingly indestructible survivor of several Armagh regimes, McGeeney's reinvention as a manager was dramatic and turbulent.

Much was made of the infamous loss to Wicklow in Croke Park, McGeeney the apprentice in a peaked cap making his moves against the wiliest chess master in sideline folklore, Mr Mick O'Dwyer. It would be romantic to think the Waterville man whispered some incantation of wisdom in the madness afterwards. But real life is not like that. "No, we didn't chat," he says briskly. "No, I don't know Mick that well."

Instead, he faced the television cameras and drove home to Dublin to stew on the defeat. Loss is not so punishing for a manager. You are not physically hurting for days afterwards. But it is there at you, gnawing, and you feel a responsibility to turn it around for this group of players running themselves into the ground for you. Managing makes you doubt in a way that playing does not.

"You do doubt yourself. You go over everything you have done. Luckily, I have trained in some of the best set-ups so I know that our training was correct. But there was obviously something missing. Yeah, I was gutted. It was hard to take. But it is easy to be great when all is going well. But the one thing I have learned, in my wet week in management, is managers have no control.

"The whole manager cult is not overstated but it is true that while a manager can lose you a game, he can never win it. Someone asked me if I was confident we would beat Wicklow. I said, it doesn't matter whether I am confident or not. It is whether the players are. I am confident in them.

"Even if people say you made a great substitution, you are living in hope that that player will come on and have enough respect for you to try and change that game, to do what he can."

FROM THE tightly-knit hamlets of Armagh to the satellite towns of Kildare is not a journey measured in actual miles. The counties are light years apart in terms of football culture. But McGeeney has found the last six months richly enjoyable. There has been no barracking - "nobody has said anything directly to me, anyhow," he grins - and as always, he has been pleasantly surprised by letters he received, particularly after the Wicklow defeat.

"It is only the bad news that gets printed but sometimes there are good things written too." There are nights he has to check himself when he shoots down the M50 for training on the plains of Kildare instead of the journey North he has come to know like the back of his hand. There is no doubt he cares for this Kildare team and wants to take them places. As for himself, who knows?

In real life, he remains on sabbatical from the Irish Sports Council and has set up a bottled water company with Patrick, his brother, called White Mountain Water, after Mullaghbawn. It is probably a little nuts, an independent company trying to muscle in on established brand leaders but that is part of the attraction of the enterprise.

Talk roams between the intrigues of Limerick and Clones. Some of the older Armagh names and faces present themselves as he reviews the years. He finds himself talking about Damien Horisk, his friend and the undisputed star turn when McGeeney was starting out with Armagh. Horisk got ill, gravely ill and had to quit the game.

"Ah, he was a great player, though. He recovered, thank God. But then his cousin, Fergal McConville, a minor star, died very young as well. It was the day before we got a hammering from Derry in the Gaelic Grounds in the mid-1990s."

That is the serious stuff. He knows it and that's why he gets awkward talking about the trials of being an ex-player, which is, in the broader scheme, a trifling issue.

"You know, you put it into words and it sounds over the top and melodramatic," he says almost sheepishly. "It's just . . . I suppose football gave me a feeling you don't often get in life. Those nerves and butterflies - it was a pure form of adrenaline rush. And the friendships too. It was a fantastic time in my life, that Armagh team, and leaving was extremely difficult.

"I do think our Armagh team was a great team," he says finally. And then the half-smile returns as he quickly adds, "but we probably won't be remembered as great."

That sounds like the perfect epitaph for a team that never quite fit with the establishment. Kieran McGeeney shakes hands and walks through the heart of the city, his white T-shirt rustling in the breeze. Moving on.