Euro 2004 qualifying/Georgia v Republic of Ireland: Tom Humphries chats to Ireland's number one Shay Given about life at the top - and about how life was getting there.

A busload of blank expressions pulls away from the Tbilisi Marriot and off through the narrow streets of town. The poverty is reaching in to the footballers, getting in their noses like belching smoke or the smell of damp.

The grey buildings all round are fossilised versions of what once made up a handsome town. People are leather faced and hard, pushing recalcitrant Ladas or walking on the crumbling footpaths.

Only Shay Given's face turns outwards to take in the scene. Nothing surprising there. Given is an old-fashioned footballer, empathetic, mindful of his roots, grateful for the privileges showered on him. Michael Kennedy did his last deal for him at Newcastle and he smiles when he thinks of it. If Donegal has two vocational traditions one would be potato picking and the other would be goalkeeping for Ireland.

He thought for a long time that his life would be the former rather than the latter, more Patrick Magill than Packie Bonner.

His mam died when he was five years old and life was hard after that. The maternal warmth was missed, but the struggles weren't just emotional. Séamus Given was left with six children under the age of 10 to look after. When you look at Shay Given and that famously stoic face you don't have to wonder for long where he got it from.

When you look at him train, hurling his chiselled body around the place for longer than is necessary with more enthusiasm than is normal, you can tell he didn't pick the work ethic up off the stones.

"It's upbringing I suppose. People ask about the father wanting me to be a professional footballer, but it was probably just out there with the dreams. If you're from Lifford, what are the chances? Slim to none? But you can dream, there's no harm in it. I got used to having a hard day's work with Dad. We had a market gardening business. Vegetables, turnips potatoes.

"I'd come in from school and we'd be thinning turnips or picking potatoes. On the weekends we'd be around the houses selling fruit and vegetables. It was hard work. Down on your hands and knees a lot of the time. Then we started out with pitch and putt and a driving range. We built that. I'd be cutting grass and mowing greens.

"Most of the time that's what I thought I'd end up doing. I thought it was harsh at the time, but I appreciate what it gave me now."

He wasn't bookish and if the work required he'd miss a day or two of school without much regret. The experiences have turned him into an unusual star in the Premiership. He hasn't been cossetted or pampered - only the thinnest tissue separates him from the people who come to watch.

"That's stayed with me. I know there are people out there doing 10, 12 hours a day of really, really hard work. Had I not been playing football I'd be there on the other side. I'd be doing that. I appreciate what I've got in life. It's stood me in good stead. It's not tough to work hard at goalkeeping. It's something I love, something I'm well paid for."

He remembers his dad as a goalkeeper for junior clubs around Donegal. When he played, Séamus Bonner would have to pack his six children in the car with him and the young Givenses would tend each other and watch their dad play. His dad's period between the sticks with White Strand is what remains most indelibly in Shay Given's memory. That, and the remote influence of Packie Bonner, thefully ordained in Celtic, Donegal's mainstream religion.

Today is something of a new beginning for Shay Given. His first game for Ireland was against Russia in the spring of 1996. It was Mick McCarthy's first game in charge of the country and the pair grew and learned on the job together, accumulating a mutual debt as McCarthy stuck with Given through thick and thin and was rewarded by seeing the player develop to the point where he is recognised not just as among the top three goalkeepers in the Premiership but as a key element of the Irish side and not just for his ability but also for his reassuring presence in the squad.

It was Given who, at Tokyo Airport, broke the atmosphere of weary tetchiness that had descended on the Irish travellers by sticking a tape of Today FM's Roy Keane parodies into a machine, coaxing a grin even on to the features of his unhappy team-mate.

And, after it all went down on Saipan, it was Given who would lift and lighten the spirits on the team bus by switching into his uncanny Roy impersonation, hollering for Mick Byrne, so that even Mick by reflex would leap up.

Alone perhaps of the squad, Given had earned the licence. His two saves against Ali Kareem in the first leg of the play-off, his late heroics against Holland at home, a dozen other moments all added up. If Roy Keane could claim to have done as much to get Ireland to the World Cup nobody could have claimed to have done more.

If you need to understand what propels him through those performances, you need draw down no more remote a memory than that night in Brussels in late 1997 when Given came off the field with a green scarf around his neck and tears running down his cheeks. Playing for Ireland is no professional duty. It's an ideal.

"Playing for my country? Maybe it's a bit of a cliché, but Dad used to bring me to games when I was a kid. It was a long day out, but growing up looking at Packie and seeing the World Cups. I don't know. I don't care what anyone else says with me, I want to play for as long as I can, to win as many caps as I can."

The new beginning under Brian Kerr has no seams on the surface. There has been no wholesale change of playing staff, no drastic change in routine.

The team still go to the movies together, still sing, still joke, but for the players the changes are small and subtle. Nothing disturbing, but a time to take stock. Mick Byrne and security man Tony Hickey are no longer with the team. Given has never known an Irish expedition without them.

"For the lads that's a little bit different. For me, Mick Byrne is missed. I spoke to him last weekend when I got into Dublin.. He had a bit of a flu and couldn't come out. Mick and Tony were a big part of the whole thing, in a way they were a kind of a double act. Little things like that have changed, but more things have remained the same.

"Brian hasn't been drastic, he brings in his own ideas. No wholesale changes. Brian has brought in his own ideas. He's meticulous. He's had Georgia watched five times.

"He has a lot of preparation work done with video. He'll go through everything, gets lots of information across to us. He places great stress on that."

Given has absorbed the changes impassively. He never played underage football for Brian Kerr, but knew him from encounters in hotels and airplanes on various trips over the years. He is happy and curious about how things will develop.

If he wasn't, though, could he ever see himself reaching the sort of cul-de-sac that Roy Keane got himself into last summer and just turning around and going home.

"Personally, I could never see that. Like I say, I want to play for as long as I can, get as many caps as I can. Roy is different, He is straight down the line with things. I like to think I have another 10 or 11 years left, but maybe a time will come when my body tells me that I can't play for both club and country. I'll have to decide whether to listen to it then."

What his body will have to tell him will be interesting. Given is 27 in a few weeks time and for a goalkeeper of that age he has quite a lot of mileage on the clock. Today, he will win his 48th cap, another small milestone on a senior career that began while he was still a teenager. In that time, he has managed to keep some very good and more experienced keepers confined to bench duty. Pavel Snricek, Shaka Hislop, Alan Kelly and Dean Kiely are among the number. Much of what brought him to the top and kept him there is linked to that childhood in Donegal.

As a team-mate, Given can't identify with Roy Keane. He can't understand how a playercould inflict that sort of collateral damage on colleagues.

One of Given's own best weapons in football and in goalkeeping, however, has been his ability to narrow his options and his willingness to walk away if necessary.

As a kid he played everything - soccer and Gaelic chiefly. His dad suggested sticking to one or the other. Soccer kicked in. He played out the field for a while and was top goal-scorer one year for the school. Dad suggested goalkeeping was the better option though. He switched to netminding. The school had no choice but to accept.

Soon, though, he had begun to make his name. He playing in the junior team for Lifford Celtic, tending goal as a 15-year-old. The Junior Cup is an epic, sprawling national competition, but Lifford got to the semi-final, and played in Oriel Park against Neilstown Rangers. If scouts wouldn't go to Lifford to watch a kid keeper, they didn't mind travelling to Dundalk.

His father's passionate belief in his ability was soon matched by that of men with cheque books.

He was at Manchester United for a couple of weeks on trial. Got injured early on, though. He went to Germany with Bradford. Best of all for a Donegal boy, ripples ran through the Given house a mile or so outside Lifford when Liam Brady, manager of Celtic, called on the phone and asked if Shay would like to come down to Dublin and join the team for some pre-season work.

"Aye, that turned my head a bit. We stayed in the Burlington. I was like one of the players. By the time they asked, I'd made me mind up to go to Glasgow. Sixteen is quite young to go from Lifford to a city like that and the first year was tough."

Donegal to Scotland. The ancient route. They went the old way. His dad and his stepmam brought him over. Larne. Stranraer. Parkhead.

"It was all an adventure till we signed and then they went home and I was alone in Glasgow. The worst was the nights in the digs. I just trained and went home to the digs. There was another guy, Nigel Melly from Derry, in there with me. He was about 21, he was in the digs and he helped me a lot.

"It was just good to have someone there with me who was from the same general area. We had nothing to do. We went bowling, went to the cinema. I didn't know why I was there a lot of the time. I'd no friends as such. I knew there was some light at the end of the tunnel, but I couldn't always see it. Dad told me often that I'd get through it and I did."

And having Packie Bonner there? Given has often told the story of following the 1990 World Cup on the television, of going into the square in Lifford after the match, of diving around the garden and starting to dream that he would one day do the things Bonner was doing.

Did it make a big difference to be working and learning in his shadow?

"It did and it didn't. I worked with him in training every day. He was an idol. He was doing what I wanted to do. I never went to his house for dinner or anything though. He never invited us to be honest (laughs).

"There were Irish connections there and I suppose they were all a help. Liam Brady was manager the first year. That made a difference."

It ended badly at Celtic, but in a way that told the football world a lot about the sort of guy it was dealing with. Five or six youngsters were called in by Lou Macari (Brady's successor) and offered identical contracts. Each was worth a pittance. For a kid at Celtic, though, it was the lifeline to a dream surely.

"I didn't think it was fair. Dad said well we're not going to sign that. So I packed it in and just came back. I worked for the summer at the family business cutting the greens and all that. Then Blackburn came in for me. I'd been on a tour to Holland with Celtic and they saw me. Pat Devlin phoned the house this time."

Blackburn began badly. Three goals conceded in a reserve game. Taken off. He knew about setbacks though by then, the loneliness of the long-distance goalkeeper. When he was in school the team got to an All-Ireland semi-final. Shay let a ball run through his legs after five minutes.

Got taken off after 15 minutes. The school lost by seven goals to one. Goalkeeping is about the bigger picture. You have to have a certain personality.

"Goalkeeper is a lonely position. I used to dwell on mistakes, but I've tried recently to improve the psychological side of the game. It's a learning curve. It's how you react to things. You can't let one setback lead to two or three. I've spoken to a sport psychologist, read some books. You have to look for positive things."

The worst mistakes are the ones that get repeated and shown over and over again. Being the only Irishman, for example who doesn't know where Dublin is (Dion Dublin that is). An error by the goalie is usually punished by a goal.

"You have to know that a mistake can happen, but when it does you shelve it till after the game. Don't dwell on it. Learn from it later on. In that way, goalkeeping shapes your character or you have the character for goalkeeping."

Makes you a bit stronger. Have to have broad shoulders. Have to get your point across. Be mentally strong.

So it was with that summer out of the game. Given was prepared to stoically learn whatever lessons it had to offer. He just got on with things.

"I was still a Celtic supporter in my heart, but the way things have worked out I have no complaints. Life is fate. Everything is just planned out for you to a certain degree. I had great experience. Blackburn was very good to me. I worked under Tim Flowers and the goalkeeping coach Terry Gennoe.

"Most kids are in the system from maybe 10 or 11 years old and they are getting coaching. I still had to learn quick."

His father had once predicted that he would play for Ireland before he was 21. In the six months before his 20th birthday things began to happen ahead of schedule. Blackburn let him off on loan to Swindon for five games, but Tim Flowers picked up a suspension and Given was recalled to sit on the bench. In January of 1996 he went to Sunderland on loan and became a folk hero.

Sunderland were eighth in the first division when he arrived. He kept 12 clean sheets in 17 games and won a championship medal. By the end of the season, he was an international too.

The following year, Peter Reid tried hard to buy him, but Blackburn wouldn't let him go until such time as they themselves were clear of the relegation zone. By the time they were, Sunderland were down. He went to Newcastle instead. Became a Geordie instead of a Makem.

The old traditional clubs he has worked for suit him. He has no love of flash. He gives off a solidity that fits in with the places he has been. And he has that odd stubbornness to keep him safe. When Newcastle dropped him, for what he considered harsh reasons in 2001, he slapped in a transfer request and only withdrew it when they begged him to stay.

"I'm glad I stayed. Maybe it was a little hotheaded on my part, but that's how I felt. When you are a goalkeeper you have to stick up for yourself. You have to speak up."

Today he'll take the bus journey again. Through the grey battered streets of Georgia. He'll be in his own private zone, but he might give a thought to Bobby Robson. A while ago in the Newcastle dressing-room Bobby Robson reminded his players that he didn't have to be doing this, he could be playing golf.

Bobby is an interesting man and Shay enjoys him hugely. Most everyone in football could say the same thing. Golf! There's another thought though. One that keeps him sane. If Shay Given wasn't doing this he'd be thinning turnips and snagging spuds.

He'll look out the window and think of that, look up into the stands in the Lokomotiv stadium and think it again. Life is fate. So is character.