Tomorrow. He knows how he would like the day to present itself. Sunny and giftwrapped. He enslaves himself to his footballing metabolism. Get up late in the morning after a night of stealing energy. Wander down to the County Club around midday and keep himself to himself after that. Lots of times he has things to say in the dressing-room, but getting himself right on the big day is an internal business.

The first round of championship football for teams who have had some downtime is like feeling your way around a vaguely familiar place in the dark. You hope you'll find the door.

Trevor Giles has been waiting a while outside that room. The comprehensive loss of a Leinster Final to Offaly at the height of last summer is the prologue to tomorrow's game. A young Meath team which landed on its paws in the summer of 1996 found itself on its backside and out of the championship last summer.

The subsequent winter passed satisfactorily, but competence in the ersatz squabbles of the league? For a team with medals and history, well leagues don't butter any parsnips. During his college days he would give the league a miss and come back to the county team in March hungry for the summer and whistling fit from the Sigerson campaigns.

Now, though, the fingerdrumming wait for championship action is a little less tolerable.

"We did okay over the winter. We would have liked to be in Division One next year, but other than that we weren't too pushed. The challenges though are a problem. We've played five of them. You don't want to play too well in them. We didn't get hammered and we didn't hammer anyone, so that's alright but until the championship starts you don't know what way the team is. I thought we were alright last summer, but we weren't as hungry for it as we should have been. You don't know about hunger until you are out there."

Last year they sure knew about hunger as Offaly rifled through their makeshift defence exposing all sorts of fault lines which nobody suspected were there. "It was a shock to us," says Giles slowly, like a man whose house has been burgled. "We won in 1996 and then we got over Kildare last year and there was a great belief in ourselves. I wouldn't say we thought we were invincible, but we never thought we'd lose a game. Fellas started dropping out of the team for the match against Offaly. Suspensions and the like and it never really dawned on us that we'd be beaten. We were fairly cocky about that."

On the border of another summer Giles surveys the team around him. The time when they were all consumed by the novelty of being senior players in Meath has long gone. They are part of a generation of high-achieving underage players who won big early in their senior careers and, as such, have been almost bulletproofed in terms of criticism within the county. Analysis at this stage has to come through introspection. Giles looks into the team and isn't entirely convinced of what he sees.

"Winning an All-Ireland as a young team did have an effect on us. We all became a good deal more buddy-buddy, we are all great friends now. We've had a couple of holidays and we all mix well together. I notice, though, we're afraid to criticise each other anymore. We used to have team meetings in 1996 and everything would be laid out on the table. Lots of constructive criticism.

"It kept the edge for us. Now we meet and we're afraid to criticise our friends. We have lots of meetings before big games and sometimes you'd wonder about it. We're a bit soft on ourselves because we all get on so well together." So tomorrow and whatever it brings will be a sort of litmus test for this Meath side which, unburdened by expectation, won its All-Ireland before it started shaving. Two years when the late summer was just for holidays might change the complexion. By Monday there could be search parties out for the lost edge.

Trevor Giles is sitting over a plate of chicken and veg on a dazzling summer day in Dundalk. He is so quiet and impeccably modest that the mention of the word cocky doesn't sit right. There can hardly be a sports person alive who plays themselves down so much in proportion to their talents. He is the living, breathing, kicking personification of the cliche about fellas who let their football do the talking.

Impeccably pleasant and accommodating, he gives a verbal body swerve any time the subject matter might provoke quotes which might draw down controversy on him.

For instance, what makes Sean Boylan such an extraordinary influence long after his players should have got tied of hearing his voice?

"He's basically a nice man and he looks after us well. If a fella looks after you well you will do your best for him. Under no pressure to perform, miss a couple of balls and you are off. Sure, I find him easy to work with anyway." That's about as hard-hitting as it gets. He zealously avoids the pitfall of the revealing anecdote, treads warily about most subjects, and hasn't a bad word to say about any opponent mentioned.

Which isn't to say that he is bad company. He has a wonderfully easy-going demeanour which makes one wonder just how much cotton wool the steel ball-bearing in the middle of his football soul is swaddled in. He forgives the interviewer the half hour of lateness, a sacrifice to the joy of sitting in Balbriggan, and urges food upon him. "Get the food before you talk."

He is squeezing the football chatter into a day in the physio department of the county hospital and wears a little white shirt with the words `chartered physio' over the shirt.

After a few years of student life the regular wage is a boon and the work keeps him in touch with sport. He hardly ever thinks of the schooldays when it was his ambition to be a vet. He repeated the Leaving Cert in Dublin, leaving St Patrick's of Navan behind with regret, but permitting himself a year of diminished football commitments. The points jackpot that veterinary undergraduates require didn't come his way, but physiotherapy was somewhere in there down the list of preferences and he went into it with a philosophical equanimity.

So it is with most things that he does. Look and learn, take it as it comes.

His introduction to the big time, the real white hot epicentre of championship football, was on an overcast day in Croke Park in 1994. Less than a happy experience. Meath lost the Leinster final to Dublin by a point and Trevor Giles kicked two frees wide as the Hill bayed its derision. Physically the stakes were high, as well, and a couple of rough challenges on him advertised the intensity of the occasion.

It was the sort of afternoon when a young player might have lost his way.

"It was very hard to compete. I had never played in a match that fast or that tough. They were the better team. Looking back now they were different from all the other games. Paul Curran was on me that day. You might as well start with the best. After that day it was always easier. No loss of confidence, though. One bad day. Lots of good ones before and since then.

"Looking back now I'd been grand in all the matches, but for the Dublin match I had a reputation set up by the media, though. After that day it was easier. I missed two frees that day (one eminently scorable in the first half) and we lost by a point so they looked more crucial and the fact that Brian Stafford was playing made it worse, people saying why didn't Brian take them.

"There was no case to argue, though. You just do it the next day. We just went our separate ways after the game. Nobody said anything to me really. The team just breaks up and there isn't too much discussion about it. You come back more determined maybe. One bad day didn't make me a bad footballer. There were plenty of good days before and after. I wasn't complaining."

Yet he had the breeding which ensured that he would survive and prosper. When Eamonn Giles moved from Navan out to Skryne to marry into that parish's Mooney clan he was wedding himself to a football dynasty. Of all the family members who have backboned various Skryne teams through the years, Trevor Giles' grandfather, Packie Mooney, was the one whose reputation attracted most legend. Packie played on the first Meath team ever to win a National League title back in the early 1930s.

Eamonn Giles brought good bloodlines to the deal himself. His father Ned had played hurling with Meath and his brother Ronan played in goal on the celebrated Meath side which defeated Dublin in the memorable league final of 1975.

The family put the football genes into him, but instilled the other virtues which turned him into the natural choice for Footballer of the Year just 24 months later.

In the aftermath of the 1994 defeat Giles had sat in the dressingroom in Croke Park and commented to his clubmate Colm O'Rourke that he wasn't strong enough for what he'd just been through. And he went away and acquired the strength to cope with the rough and tumble so that he could impose his excellence on games.

Dublin at Croke Park was quite a step up, but he had been mixing it with the big fellows for a couple of years before that. As a 17-yearold he was one of the decisive influences on a Skryne team which wrestled a county title for itself in 1992, having lost in their five previous final appearances. Breaking through to the Meath team as an unworldly teenager had also been a crunching experience.

"I think I just missed the days when the older fellas would test out young players to see how brave they were, but the generation I came along with were a smaller team generally. The first night going out there and mixing with them in a practice match was a bit strange. Nobody was seeing what you were made of, but you knew sort of that you had to cope with it. That people were watching you."

By then he was used to expectation. He denies it with strenuous modesty, though, citing many others whom he considered better than himself.

"I was good enough, but no more. I didn't get on the Meath under-14 team. I got on the under16s when I was 16, but not earlier. There were lots of better lads in school. They fell away and I stuck at it and just got there eventually. Brendan Martin and Alan Finnegan, they were the top guys in school - he's still with us, but Ollie Murphy was great. I would have been good, but not anywhere near the best. "A lot of lads on the Meath panel didn't get on the minor team - Jimmy NcGuinness, Mark O'Reilly, Tommy Dowd, Evan Kelly, John McDermott. You notice that fellas that just stick with it and work hard generally get there. I wasn't the biggest physically. I persevered, though."

It is a compelling thesis, but Trevor's fanfare for the common man is a by-product of his desire for a quiet life. He is a cautious interviewee and pathologically modest.

Those who knew him say that Giles stood out as a future star from primary school onwards. Colm O'Rourke, who taught him in St Pat's, remembers him as the star of every team he played on.

"That's Trevor. He'd be very conscious about not wanting to appear as if he is different from anybody else. Trever was good academically and he was the best player we had. I think when Meath can afford to play him there, he will be the outstanding centre back in the country. He's a made forward. Back in school he used to play wing back or midfield, depending on how he was needed."

By the time he reached Pat's he was a prominent part of the Skryne club, one of the kids who seemed to have taken up residence on the pitch.

His father trained most of the underage teams he played on and currently trains the club's senior team. That sort of situation would be difficult for a less placid character, but if Giles denies charges of stardom he always knew he was no dog on the football field.

"For lads that might have been borderline on teams I can see that there might have been problems with something like that. I thought I earned places on teams though. Daddy was a big influence all the way through. I'd never have even thought to worry about him managing a team I was playing on."

He is finishing up his meal and thinking about getting back to work before the afternoon gets much older. Final words on the team that steps out tomorrow.

"We'd be a different bunch to the old players. We certainly wouldn't have the sort of player power that Dublin would have had for a couple of years there. What Sean says is still what goes with us."

He shrugs his shoulders, says good luck, and drifts of out into shimmering heat of the afternoon, only the extraordinary upper body tipping the onlooker that one of the greatest footballers in the land has just left the building.