Mayo's Bank of Ireland Connacht championship meeting at Castlebar tomorrow sees them defending only one title. Two provincial crowns have yet to lead on to greater things. Amidst the depressing debris of last September's All-Ireland final, the man who was arguably the central figure in their difficulties watched from the bench.

It might have been forgotten as Mayo closed in on a second successive final but an incident on June 29th last probably finished off their All-Ireland chances. Kevin Cahill, the county's outstanding full back, had suffered a knee injury which ended his season.

By the time he was making a comeback, six months had passed, during which time Maurice Fitzgerald's tour de force in the All-Ireland final had buried Mayo. Pat Holmes had coped intelligently with the demands of being an improvised full back until that day when Fitzgerald left him all at sea.

Manager John Maughan is no doubt about the gravity of Cahill's loss. "Huge impact. He would have been the ideal player to put on Maurice Fitzgerald."

Cahill remembers the incident which had such dramatic consequences. "It was against Leitrim. The ball hopped in front of me and I jumped up to catch it. There was no-one around me but I came down awkwardly. I'd never been injured before. At first I thought I'd dislocated it but then although it was sore, I tried to run it off. I ran after a ball and just collapsed.

"Initially, they thought it was cartilage, that the cruciate hadn't been severed. It's the sort of thing you read about. I had never had a serious injury, thought it would never happen."

As the diagnosis sank in, Mayo kept Cahill around the training sessions. Manager John Maughan would have known the feeling as his career ended prematurely because of knee injury and the then Mayo manager John O'Mahony (in charge of Galway tomorrow) invited him to help out with the panel. Cahill, however, was aware of the artificiality.

"During the rest of last season they tried to keep me involved but you knew you weren't really part of it. For the All-Ireland final, I was in the dugout but there's nothing you can do from there. It was very frustrating. Every time you're watching a game, you think I might have done it that way - you mightn't actually but you think you might."

Arduous rehabilitation didn't help his mood and at times he suspected that the curtain might have effectively come down on his career.

"At the beginning, I thought if the team wins the All-Ireland I might never come back because the team might break up. After the defeat, they decided to give it another year and so I stayed."

An accountant working in a practice in his home town of Ballaghaderreen, Cahill is 26 next month and distinguished by clear sense of perspective about football. According to John Maughan, "Kevin throws his gearbag in the boot of the car and doesn't think of it. Life goes on".

The continuous grind of training and playing at the top has been more marked, Cahill feels, this season. "It's more intense this year. If we don't do it this year, it won't happen. You can only go over the top so much. To tell you the truth, if I got an All-Ireland medal, I might not be back. There are so many other things in life. When you play inter-county football, there's time for nothing else - career or travel."

Ironically, given his form in 1996 and the loss he was to the team last year, Cahill didn't have his best match during the historic win in Tuam 12 months ago. "One of those occasions which didn't go right," says Maughan.

Cahill himself is at a bit of a loss to explain how it happened. "Niall Finnegan had a good game. I didn't feel good in myself, I don't know why - maybe it was the heat. Some days are better than others."

If his demeanour doesn't tally with the obsessive devotion assumed of an inter-county player, that sense of displacement hovers over his early life. Born of Irish parents in the US, Cahill lived in Philadelphia until he was 10. From the city of brotherly love to Ballaghaderreen, the town five miles into Roscommon that insists on retaining its Mayo identity for football. It was all a bit weird for the young Cahill.

"I had no great allegiance to Mayo or Roscommon and no great interest in football. But there was nothing else to do. Play Gaelic football or nothing."

Does he worry now about the fact that three All-Ireland finals (including the 1996 replay) have passed the county by without the opportunities having been exploited?

"Yeah. You're left wondering: am I going to regret those two chances. I suppose there's a lot expected now but it's the same as any other year, lose and you're out."

Maughan is confident that his full back will meet the challenge. "Kevin has improved every time he's togged. I'd say he's 95 per cent there which would be sufficient. He's a fabulous footballer with pace and good hands. He's very quick and you've got to have that everywhere on a team. He's also a very shrewd reader of the game, a smart individual. When he plays well, the defence plays well."