The warnings, issued to both camps, were explicit. Roaming would not be tolerated. The backroom boys must chain themselves to the bench or risk heavy fines. (We are talking at least two table quizzes plus a raffle to balance the books here).

Colm Bonnar shakes his head a little pensively at the thought of standing stationary in the shadows for 70 minutes of Tipperary and Waterford. Still, at least it would spare him having to jog past the Tipperary dug-out, evading the sting of the wisecracks or the moment where he'd brush past Nicholas English or Ken Hogan, his old comrades from the bygone seasons that seem as yesterday. Yeah, for the Waterford trainer and former Tipperary hurler maybe these stipulations might ease the very strangeness of the afternoon. But, then, who is he fooling?

"I dunno," he considers, weighing it up. "When it gets a bit hairy it's difficult to see the lads just sitting there. We discuss everything with Gerald (McCarthy) and he is out on the sideline, living every ball. We'll have to get out there to communicate to him."

Since he started training Waterford in the National League, Colm Bonnar has always felt a brief pang of longing whenever games were quivering deliciously, an ache reminding him that never again will he inhale the very soul of the sport as the players do. His last big-time match for Tipperary, the 1997 All-Ireland final, gave him a memorable and perfect gulp of that sensation, even though his side were squeezed out by a point.

"A great game, it was there for the winning for either side. Walking off the field, I kind of knew that I would never see Croke Park again as a player, which was hard. I didn't know what to do then, whether to pack it in or not.

"Noel Sheedy was the last link to 1986 along with myself and he knew his legs were gone. I felt more mobile and wrung another year out of it but broke my wrist going into the next championship. I played anyhow, midfield against Waterford and Tony Browne was flying it then. I went off and Brian O'Meara came in and played great stuff for us.

"In a way, it was a sad way for the whole thing to end. I'd rather have gone in '97. Should known really."

He recalls all this in the quiet, unfussy way of his, leaning back on a chair in his office at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), absent-mindedly flicking at a finger bandage. His hair is silvering a little and he will, evidently, always retain the unfleshed agility of the natural athlete.

Sometimes, he wonders at himself. When Gerald McCarthy approached him about training Waterford and maybe selecting, he could have bagged, oh, hundreds of reasons why the task was too much. But that reflex, the scent of another season, won out. "I don't think I could ever be purely a selector. It is a vital job but I always feel the need to get involved with the team. It's a strange thing, selecting. Everyone shares in the decisions but the manager gets all the plaudits or the blame. Sometimes I would be giving a two-hour physical session and the other lads would be over on the sidelines, observing, taking it in. To just watch lads running for that long night after night, it's a hard job."

And Bonnar remembers well those gimlet eyes of the murmuring jury from his own playing days. Too regularly he felt the whiplash of their thinking, something that has made him acutely sensitive to the delicacy of the relationship between a player and the backroom staff. Although he was a constant on Tipperary teams for over a decade, he felt undermined by Babs Keating's ideology. An incident in the summer of 1989 sparked a tense history.

"I went away to the States on a trip with the college for 10 days after the Munster final. We were due to play Galway in the semi-final and when I got back, I just knew something was wrong. They'd avoid your eye, not encourage you. Their opinion would have been that 'twas a privilege to play for Tipperary, that you should be glad to have been training. So they were encouraging Declan Carr, it was, at that time. If they'd have come up and just said, `look, we were going with Carr', it might have been easier.

"We won the game and I was delighted that I played my way back into the team for the final but it was always something that stuck in my mind."

Those uncomplicated days, when players took the knock and choked back the hurt, are gone now.

"I wouldn't say it happens too much any more. Certainly, we make a point of going up to lads to explain the decisions. Anthony Kirwan played most of the league and he's not starting Sunday. Must be the first championship start Billy O'Sullivan's missed in 15 years. That's hard to take.

"But the whole thing has changed anyway. Back when I was starting out, it was still a huge commitment, though not as rushed." Work, other commitments sometimes come before hurling in recent years. "I think some hurlers could sort of take it or leave it now," he says. "Some excellent club lads, both in Waterford and Tipp just wouldn't be bothered." In 1993, Bonnar himself felt emptied of care. He was in his late 20s, on the crest as an athlete but mentally he was in turmoil. Always versatile, he found himself plugging up gaps every second week and the confidence seeped out of him. Never felt like an automatic choice, like English or Pat Fox or Michael Cleary.

"I just think now that Babs didn't like my type of hurling," he shrugs. "Getting moved about, I didn't mind it so much. Midfield, corner back, even wing forward, I roved about. But you'd know if you were just filling in for a lad. Then, if he came back after an injury and a fella that had been in your spot at midfield was going well, you'd get squeezed."

So in the summer of 1993, after a semi-final loss to Galway, he decided to quit.

"Even making the first 15, I felt under pressure, as if I'd be the first to be called ashore. I just wasn't enjoying it, thinking the selectors were looking at me the whole time - and they probably weren't at all, I'm sure I was just being self-conscious. But I was taken off early that day and, walking to the sideline, I just felt this surge of relief, all this pressure drain away. And I said I'd had enough, that I could do without it."

Back in Cashel, they gently reproached him for his decision. The Bonnar family were royalty on the local hurling scene and Cormac, Conal and Colm were the most widely recognised hurling brothers in the country. But even when they coaxed him back, he was hesitant, uncertain whether he wanted it. Eventually, he rediscovered himself at centre back under Fr Tom Fogarty.

"He (Bonnar) was always one of Tipp's most consistent players and even though he was in his twilight then, we knew he could do a job. And he excelled for us," says Ken Hogan, then a mentor under Fr Fogarty and now on Nicky English's staff.

He's happy he returned. "My last two years were probably among my best," he nods.

These nights, when he leaves the house to train Waterford, four-year-old Cillian ("yet another C Bonnar") has the habit of asking him why he is always going training.

"It's tempting to drop the bag at the door right then and stay. I do try and switch off from the hurling for (his wife) Mairead's sake as well. But we have both made great friends out of the game and because she's from Cashel, too, she knew early on what the game meant to me."

Hogan gives a great recitation of a famous yarn which occurred during an All Star trip to the United States in the good old days which, he felt, sums up his friend's approach to the game. Intense, serious and endearing.

"Colm was captain and going out the second day, he was very conscientious about what we had to do to win this game - against Galway it was. No messin', plenty of rest. Myself and Colm, as Tipperary men, were rooming together and during the night, Colm must have gotten a bit thirsty.

He was so involved in thinking about the game, he just drank the nearest glass to him. It was only in the morning, when he went to look for the contact lenses, that he realised what he'd done.

"So he had to go along to the manager and explain that he wouldn't be able to play. They had to X-ray him to establish precisely where the lenses were. I think that was the last of them.

"But George O'Connor ended up captaining the side and was presented with a beautiful Waterford Crystal piece worth about a thousand quid. And there was poor Colm on the sidelines in a pair of jeans, feeling awful dejected. I still laugh when I think of him there."

These are the jewels, more so than the silverware and great sequences of play, that the fading athletes hold dearest. Colm Bonnar loves every trip to Cashel now, as if it were a last fling with the old life. His father, a Donegal man who believed that daylight was for working, gradually came to get great joy out of a sport that formed the life rhythm of his adopted homeplace.

After he passed away in Cashel, Colm decided to transfer back to his home club, to visit home as much as anything.

And so, tomorrow. A first for the Bonnar clan. For once, Colm Bonnar is on the outside looking in. Of Tipperary, but not with them. He nods at the inevitability of a unique hour.

"Tipp . . . I don't know why but a lot of people seem to dislike them. We've only won three All-Irelands in the last 33 or 34 years, which is very little. It's a strange perception. Even in Waterford around 1987/'88, we kept them down and we wouldn't have been too well liked. So having seen our side of it and all that success and then to go to Waterford and see the same preparation without the return, you do have to admire it. So for this game, I'll be too involved with them to think of anything. Hard to know how it'll go. Either way, I'll be able to sit down with Ken or Nicky and have a drink afterwards. We all know how it is. Nothing has changed." Nothing but the times.