Interview Brian Kerr: Tom Humphries gets lost in the traffic but still finds the patio where waits an Irish manager enjoying a rare quiet moment to reflect on football and life

Dog day afternoon. Heat makes a microwave of the car. And heat turns the blacktop tar to glue. Seething heat. Must be the war. We never used to have heat like this. Not on a Holy Thursday. End of the world must be nigh. You're stuck in traffic for it.

That's it. Judgment Day. There are a million microwaves stuck in this fat, slow congestion of sticky-wheeled microwaves. Off the M50? Every vein clogged. Every driver sticking like treacle to the car seat. Heat. Seething heat.

Boiling heat. Is that a pool of sweat on your car seat or are you just excited to see me? The road is full of compartments. In each a slow-bobbing head. In every head that steady dry throb in the temple.

Road rage. Road Rage. Road Rage. Just drop the match baby. Just set us off.

Beep Beep. Beep Beep.

Quick expletive. Spit it towards the floor. God-damn mobile. Hiding on the floor. Hiding under the seat. Why? Brief surge of mobile rage. YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME. Sudden desire to drop mobile out window and reverse over it repeatedly while screaming loudly. Still. The mobile has called. Must obey.

Txt msg. Brian Kerr.

"Waiting on patio." Curses. Forehead beaten off steering wheel. Mutinous feeling in stomach. Road rage? Professional panic? Coronary? Nausea? The international soccer manager with that luminous reputation for meticulous preparation is waiting on the patio. Drumming his fingers. Losing the will to speak in anecdotes. Growing impatient.

Beep Beep. Beep Beep.

Oh f***. Time to cut a deal.

"Listen, God," you say, "I know it's been ages and I've put on weight and done a fair few mortallers since we last spoke, but just do me this one favour. Lift me like a wing-ed sparrow out of this traffic and place me down near the cool of that patio. Just a little hocus pocus and I'll be your handmaiden. One teeny weeny little miracle and I'll recant. I'll denounce Satan. I'll read a purgatory's worth of David Quinn columns. Puh-lease. Oh man. I won't let on that we did business. Puh-lease." Txt msg. Brian Kerr.

"Where R U?" Too agitated to text back the bald truth. Which would be: "Brn, Am in a spcl hell for morons." Not enough space to explain it all to the most meticulously prepared man on earth: "Brn. Yr patio is in Spawell, Tmplgue.

"Me? Jst left Spa Hotel, Lucan. V Srry." Unsympathetic bstds can insert their own jokes.

Lost now. Blind lost. Later than is forgivable. More lost than is possible. A twilight zone of lostness where nothing looks familiar anymore. Stuck on a bridge in Rialto. Think it's Rialto. Need directions. Zoom. Passenger window winds down just beautifully. Volvo! Lean left. Looking for directions. Anyone? A face fills the space where the window glass just was. Oh. Unshaved. Perfumed with drink. Red rheumy eyes on this moth-eaten man. Sunny day and he hasn't showered. Not this year. In front of his face is his outstretched palm. Poor divil.

You're both about the same age. He's homeless. You're in a Volvo. The mobile phone rings. You both stare down at the passenger seat. There on the leather upholstery is a Nokia mobile phone ringing away and a ready to roll Sony MiniDisc recorder, the microphone for which costs two hundred on its own. The Sony MZ-N707! Late, lost and about to have your mini disc recorder robbed. Your eyes meet again. C'mon punk make my day.

"FUCK OFF!" The face dissolves. Hurt. The face disappears. The road is still sticky and slow. The panic is still in the head. Feeling guilty. Double guilty. Where's your decency gone? And you are later than is forgivable. Later than could be imagined. You're going straight to hell.

Spawell! Not so well. Hit that patio running.

"Howya," says Brian Kerr and takes off his shades ...

"Sorry, sorry, sorry."

"No bother. What can I get you?"

"Sorry. Really, really sorry."

He steers you to a seat. Disappears to organise two fizzy oranges.

"You know," he says when he comes back laden with Fanta, "that's the first time in ages I've had a chance to just sit and think." Pulse normal. Breathing steady. The man is talking. You listen. When the man talks you listen. He has that quality. That wisdom.

There's a story that appeals to him. It's more about Noel O'Reilly than about Brian Kerr but it sums the two of them up in a way. That left-field quality they bring. The unexpected. The magic realism of their tale.

It took place a long time ago, 1985. In Tbilisi, Georgia, during the reign of King Tuohy. Liam to you. Youth World Cup. Not a lot to do between games. You could tell that the Iveria Hotel had once had a little majesty, though. They lolled about, made their own fun.

One day out on the street, in the dusty square, they made up a game of imaginary cricket. The Dolan twins were central. Noel of course. Everyone got caught up in it. A player standing stooped over imaginary wickets and bails, swinging the invisible willow wand slowly in his hands in anticipation. Just feeling the weight. Up the crease the bowler means mischief. He rubs a ball which nobody can see up and down on his jumper. He fingers the seam, looks around at his fielders before he begins his run.

Here he comes. Ooh a wicked bouncer.

The lads gasp, but the batsman cuts the blade beautifully and sends it to the outfield where, oh, upon my word, a Georgian lady leaning from a balcony scoops her hand down and catches in her hand a ball which never existed. The lads cheer. She waves triumphantly. Tosses the ball back girlishly to the bowler.

Out! And the fielders set themselves again. The bowler limbers up once more. The batter takes his walk for duck. A whole game.

Joao Havelange strolled past. Shook his head, bewildered. Players, spectators, people divided by language and experience all playing cricket together in Joe Stalin's backyard. All playing imaginary cricket.

Later they went inside and played imaginary snooker on imaginary tables in the hotel lobby, beseeching passers-by to have a little respect for the players. Best of order please, Mr Kerr is at the table. He needs snookers.

In beautiful minds all things are possible. All those years, 27 of them, Brian Kerr stared out from high windows and looked at the football fields below and heard them singing to him. Twenty-seven years. Life could have been slipping away like a setting sun.

Twenty-seven years. A working lifetime as a lab technician. Yet he was always more than the rebel digit in some white coat's equation; here was a man who could smell summer grass that day in Tbilisi. Not a man ever to be betrayed by some smallness of the imagination. Never.

Not long after he got the job he met Pat Fenlon.

"Pat. I heard you wanted John Aldridge to get the job?" It had been on his mind since he heard it. What did he do on Pat Fenlon when he had him at Pat's. Why John Aldridge? Finally he met him. Asked him.

"Nah, nah," said Pat "I just didn't think it was realistic that one of us could get the job. It's great but I didn't think it was realistic. One of us!"

Lately everybody knows his name. He's had to be figuring out what changed about him that suddenly the world needs him to open supermarkets and talk in schools and present medals.

Just now, in the middle of the interview, three young fellas marched up to him.

"Give us your autograph."

"Is there not a word that goes with that?"

"Please."

"Well done. Now give me one of your wine gums. Please."

"Only when you give me your autograph. Please."

"OK."

"Thanks. Here's a wine gum."

"A black one. Well fair play to ya."

"Will ya sign me runner?"

"Could you not get Ronaldo to sign it?"

Twenty-seven years. And then international soccer management! Twenty-seven years and now this? Autographs for wine gums! He cracked the system and dreamed the dream. A CV like his. Brian Kerr's won't be complete without the word astronaut tagged onto it sometime between now and his distant dotage.

He left school with a Leaving Cert in the summer of Pele. Brazil beat Italy 4-1 in the World Cup final and Brian Kerr worked in Coyle Hamilton Insurance with Johnny Fallon, who does the kit for the Irish team now. Life had its possibilities.

He'd been playing for Crumlin. He went to Shels that year at under-17. Went to UCD very soon after that. Albert College.

Footballing youth has only two endings. Brian Kerr's was the road more travelled. Twenty-two years old when he bought his first house. Mortgage. Job. Kids. And all the usual hardships.

"It was a struggle. Every bit of it was a struggle. But we were brought up without much." He pauses.

"Do I sound like David O'Leary now?" He laughs.

"Listen. I was always busy. Money has never been an issue. Never meant anything." Football quickened his blood.

By 1970 he'd already been coaching for a few years. He'd take Crumlin United teams out and see this geezer coaching the opposite touchline with Belvedere Boys.

This would be Noel O'Reilly. Sancho Panza. They met formally in the mid-1970s at a coaching course in Gormanston College. In 1981 Tuohy brought them together. Noel had been working in Milltown with Giles and Dunphy, going out to do bits in the morning with them. Kerr had been with Tuohy at Rovers in 1974 and he'd still see Tuohy in the Stadium on Friday nights at the boxing. Tuohy was running Trinity in the League of Ireland B. They'd be playing against each other. From the blue he rang. Do you know Noel O'Reilly? It'll be you and me and him.

Noel and Brian have been going around together ever since.

"I used to tease him. If he came to Pat's I'd say we'd win the European Cup. We beat Finland in Dalymount one Sunday. I said you come in and work. We'll win the European Cup. Go back to Belvo and win things when you're 65.

"He's a magic person. Magic. He doesn't go by the book. No manual. He challenges himself all the time. He sees things differently. Today, sessions are all done with cones. I do them myself but Noel is nearly happier to do the thing without them. He can see it all in his head."

Once UEFA asked them to show their stuff in Leningrad at a youth conference. Brian and Noel in a big air-hangar in Leningrad. Patchy carpet on the floor. European suits standing all around. Russian players waiting to play their parts.

Andy Roxburgh put on a session before them. Brilliant. Then Noel came up with this idea. Simplicity. Noel told the players to put just their bags down in heaps. Now then, that's the goals, he said. Two matches going on and Noel was improvising like a jazz man while Kerr did the rounds explaining to the coaches that this was the joy of football. Bags for goalposts. Brings it all back to basics.

Life is more complicated now, of course. There's a fuss about him everywhere he goes. So much so that he enjoys being in England a lot of the time. He can move anonymously there still.

Yet he's been sucked towards the madding crowds of the Premiership. That crazy world is unavoidable now. He realised that straightaway. Weeks in the job and the first test was Roy Keane and Manchester United.

"Listen," he says now. "We had a great meeting. I came out of it happy. He was going to come and play. We felt we could resolve any of the angles that needed to be sorted out. In the back of my head, though, I thought maybe there'll be a few jigs and reels ithis yet. Roy has different pressures. Pressures coming at him from everywhere. The timing of the whole thing suited other people. It didn't suit me. I've spoken to Roy since. That's the way it went. That night before the Scotland game I just wanted it finished. Wanted it done. He's been a great player. He's a loss."

Keane rang Kerr once since Scotland. He was doing an interview with David Walsh of The Sunday Times. He rang to explain and to express some disappointment that Kerr had made a comment to the effect that he had fellas who wanted to play, the inference being perhaps that Keane didn't want to play.

"I explained the circumstances of the timing. I had so many people waiting for me, the night before our first match. I had to handle that as best I could, maybe the words weren't great but we had a grand conversation. Since then he's left a couple of messages wishing us well for the matches. That's grand. It's a pity because he's such a player, such an influential player. The players we've lost were down the middle of the team. Stan. Niall. Roy. Alan Kelly. The centre of the team on the field and off it."

Keane was one much-ballyhooed part of the test. There's another element. Dealing with young millionaires. He no longer takes the boy and makes the man. The men arrive. They have the keys to sports cars in their pockets. He talks about it. It's a source of frustration that so many players live cosseted lives, insulated by clubs from having to do the normal decision making of grown-ups. Irish players are a little different, he thinks, though. They have decisions. Go to England. Stay in England. Have a girlfriend in England or not. That could mean you settle in England forever.

And so on.

"But the money they are all earning doesn't bother me. They are all insecure in their own ways. I'm talking to fellas in the last few weeks and a few of them have new managers. If they are in the team the view is that he's changed things for the better and he's great. If they're not in the team they don't rate them. I see it with players. They are always delighted with anything that helps their self-confidence.

"The staff we have haven't spent all our time as footballers. Chris Hughton was a trainee lift engineer. Noel qualified as a printer, worked in schools with the visually impaired, teaching and recreational teaching, special skills. Packie did the Leaving here, going away from a remote place. One-club man. Great stability there. Brian McCarthy has this Cork/Kerry accent yet he's lived in places like Belfast and Zimbabwe. There's lots of experiences that they bring to the mix.

"We're like GAA mentors except we don't all have to sit on one knee looking at a slip of paper before we put on a sub."

They bring lots of experiences and they encounter lots of experiences. This new part of life, money and fame and pressure means not just being a simple football man anymore. It stresses him a little, all these extra demands.

How has it affected his family?

"Take it handy on the family stuff," he says. He is terrier-like about privacy.

"Sure," you say.

"Four daughters." he says, "all big girls now." No names.

The impact on them? Maybe now, he thinks, now he has this job they all understand him a little better. Maybe, they say, he wasn't there as much as he could have been but now we see it.

"Jaysus," he says shaking his head, "I used to bring them to matches for their Confirmation and Communion."

"You didn't."

"Did."

"Yeh. Ah, they're not upset with me. Not now anyway! I remember one day even going to a friendly in Dalymount between the visiting after a Confirmation."

A couple more stories pry lose. Small things but good things.

When Brian Kerr was a kid himself he fell in love. Fell hard. St Patrick's Athletic. Inchicore. The sound of the river, the smell of the crowd.

He never saw them win anything and time eroded the feelings. He had time with Shels, Rovers, Drogheda, and poured his heart into each. Always, though, he had that little thing for Pat's. It took a long time from 1986, when they made him manager, till 1990, when the first league came. He'd been following them since he was nine. This was the first thing he'd seen the club win. Pure joy.

The second time around was more complicated. Between times there'd been so much hassle: liquidation, receivership, the ground nearly going. It bothered him that he'd pushed the club to leave Inchicore for a while and then it had looked like they wouldn't get back.

"When we finally got back it was fantastic, but all those feelings were wrapped up in the second league win."

The second time they won the league it was in Dundalk that they hung the ribbon on the cup. Muddy day. Grey and black.

A late goal to win the thing. At the end when the long whistle blew the arms shot up to the glowering sky and from across the pitch he could see his girls running through the muck in the middle of everyone, glee on their faces, making airplane wings of their arms. That it meant so much to them. Well.

"I said to myself at least they know now why I was missing so much. You do regret what you missed. I'd have regrets like that, about how little attention I'd paid to me brothers and sisters over the years, missing family occasions and weddings and stuff.

"And with Pat's I was always afraid it would go sour and I didn't want them around for that but after I left Pat's they'd go anyway. They had that little bit of love for it.

"Sometimes," he says, "they surprise me and ah, I do be delighted. One of them (he slips the name in for off-the-record purposes), she came home one day and looked at me: 'Da will you go down to the Chinese and get us something.'

"Have you no money?"

"'Yeah, but I gave it all away on the way home. There was a little fella sitting begging on O'Connell Bridge and he was freezing.'

"Your bus fare and all. Did you give him your bus fare?"

"'Well, I kept me bus fare but I gave him me chips.'

"I said, 'Jaysus, I'll settle for that'. When she said that aw . . ." There's a tear just escaping from his eye. Silence.

"You'd done something right?"

"No. Not that I did something right. That she had it in her. A little bit of decency."

And he wipes his cheek. Gallops through the rest of his daughters, their happy achievements.

He's uncomfortable but you can see why people love this man. Would die for him. A manager of a different sort breaks the spell.

"Mr Kerr would you sign the visitors' book for us?"

"OK."

"Jack Charlton signed it."

"Don't tell me that."

"And Mick McCarthy."

"Youse should bring back the bands. There used to be great bands played here."

"Well, the adult dancing is still going."

"For Jaysus sake, I'm not that old."

Time to leave. He's going to see Pat's. Ryan Casey. Dave Freeman. Liam George. His kids. He's looking forward to running into them all. All those kids and he never fell out with a single one of them. He's surprised you even ask. Why would he? He admires them. Everyone of them was special.

He knows, too, that when it comes to directions you are special. He insists you follow him to Crumlin, from where it will be easy to get home to the northside. You drive behind him till he sticks his hand out the window and signals to go straight ahead. He's indicating left.

For a brief moment, still hypnotised by him, your flasher indicates a left turn too. You can almost see him rolling his eyes to heaven as he glances in the rear mirror and sees you shaping to follow him home.

Pied pipers and magic men should be used to that sort of thing.