Prior to Munster's memorable win at Vicarage Road against Saracens, as is customary Declan Kidney held a video session a couple of days before the game. Standing up from behind the recorder he had just set up, Kidney provoked widespread laughter among his players by wearing the Saracens' Fez on his head, and manoeuvring his own canine tee-carrier by remote control after hitting the play button.

"Now, what happened in the last five minutes?" he inquired, stopping the video re-run. The fezs, the tee-carrier, the majorettes, the sudden, loud music from the p.a. system during the game (such as a few blasts from the Rocky soundtrack whenever a fight broke out) are all part of the Vicarage Road routine at Saracens' home games. "These are the distractions you'll face," he warned, and at the admitted risk of making a fool of himself, Kidney had demonstrated how distracting they could be more ably than perhaps any coach would be willing to do.

Such an example illustrates how innovative, deep-thinking and perhaps slightly quirky Kidney is about this coaching lark. He's clearly a very bright man, with a high IQ, and a sharp wit, who's essentially a private man, guarded in the glare of the public eye and at most ease within the perimeters of his squad.

"It's an education to know him," says Brian O'Brien. The Munster manager and incoming Irish manager adds: "By that I mean he's an intelligent, astute man. He's a hard task master but he's a pleasure to work with. He adopts a totally honest approach and he cares deeply for the game and the people in it."

If he is a hard task master, then you'd never think it from talking to his players, which is perhaps one of his best tricks. "You'd never want to miss a training session because there's always something interesting in them," says John O'Neill. "The talking is done beforehand; they're short, sharp, to the point and interesting."

Though he may have had his teething problems with Munster last season after making the transition from a largely underage coach to coaching adults, players who've played under him from Presentation College, Cork, right up to Munster seem to ooze respect for him. They'd never tell him a lie, about an injury or how they were feeling, because he also commands honesty.

One senses this is because he treats them as people first and rugby players second. "We're always having a laugh," says Eddie Halvey, "but the work is done, and done well at the same time. I can honestly say it's the best camp I've ever known. It's the best spirit within a squad I've ever experienced."

Undoubtedly, it's that intangible, that spirit, which contributed significantly to Munster's late comeback wins against Saracens. It will assuredly stand to them again in Bordeaux today, and is what gives them a better chance than any Irish province would ever have had before of beating Europe's premier French club on French soil in May.

It's a big task, but it's debatable as to whether Kidney has faced into bigger games, for in point of fact he's probably faced more pressurised ones. What makes this one different is that "we have a load of good feeling behind us. I don't know does anybody really expect us to win, which is a nice way to be because there is no pressure. But I suppose I never saw much reason in going into a competition unless you were trying to win it."

"We'll probably have to play in a positive way for longer because in the Stade Francais game we did really well at the start. Then they came back at us, half-time came at a good time for us and in the second half we kept them outside of our 22 without ever having to go chasing the scores. I wouldn't imagine this one is going to be like that. We'll probably have to go hunting for a few more tries than we did in the last game so that's going to make for a different type game to a certain extent. There's no two games the same."

Kidney began learning that from an early age through his father Joe, a former player and past president of Dolphin, who took him to three matches every weekend after watching his son play schools' rugby on Saturday mornings. There followed attendance at a senior game that afternoon, then a thirds match on Sunday morning and a seconds match in the afternoon.

"I look back on that as very informative because you saw it done well on a Saturday afternoon, you saw it done differently on a Sunday morning and you saw fellas trying to do it well on a Sunday afternoon."

Other formative influences were Brother John Beacher and Des Barry at Presentation, Barry Brunt at College, and others such as Christy Cantillon "a players' coach who helped you to express yourself to be as good as you could be."

Kidney accepts the description of him as a canny outhalf with a good boot in his playing days at Dolphin. The Munster Juniors were as high as he scaled on the representative ladder. "Looking back on it now I was probably overly harsh on myself and overly analytical in what I could do. But I loved it." He singles out a schools' final and then says, "as for a club one, I suppose any time I made the team."

Though he laughs at this, he points out that his various omissions, and the manner of them, had a lasting effect on him as a coach. "There would have been a lot of times when I would have read in the paper on a Thursday whether I was playing or not." So now he strives to inform players individually. "There's no right way or wrong way to tell a player that he is or isn't playing, but I think it's important to tell them."

Kidney's coaching modus operandi seems to be about the power of positive thinking as much as anything else. Getting even the Munster players to mentally move on from a psyche of "now we're in Europe let's play a few matches" to something far more ambitious was his biggest single breakthrough or achievement.

Before even transmitting this to his players he first has to believe in it himself and he patently does. He forever accentuates the positive and has a belief in Irish sporting talent surpassed by few coaches. Prompted by the vexed tug-of-war between clubs and province of late, and the fear that we are over-extending our leading players, he says: "We have a brilliant natural resource with an awful lot of rugby players in the country. In fact I think in the country overall we're unbelievable how many sports people we turn out for the size of us, yet we can be very harsh on one another and criticising one another. But if you have such a good natural resource you need to care for it and not abuse it, so that it doesn't turn sour."

Kidney has been exposed to this natural resource from an early age with young talent when he was asked to coach the PBC under-13s when Kidney himself was only 19. "When you do your groundwork at 13s and 14s for two or three years and you have all the highs and lows of dealing with 50 kids at one time, then that's a big help to you. Then you take that on to another level."

Success has followed him around, through four Munster Schools' Senior Cups with Pres, a Triple Crown with the Irish Schools, winning seven out of nine on an Irish schools tour of New Zealand, promotion to Division One with Dolphin, a World Cup with the Irish under-19s and latterly Munster's first-ever back-to-back interprovincial titles while breaking new ground in the European Cup each year, not forgetting a first Triple Crown and championship for the Ireland A side.

Yet he maintains: "I'm not that important at all, or a coach isn't that important at all. You can just facilitate what they want to do. If they want to do it, 99 per cent of the work comes from themselves. The coach doesn't win the matches."

"It's a great way of staying involved. Somebody once asked what my ambition is in coaching and I suppose my ambition is to be lucky enough to work with players who have ambition.

"Going into the job I wanted to do well for the players' sake," he says, and then points to other coaches in the province such as Pat Murray, Michael Bradley and, of course, his assistant Niall O'Donovan.

At one stage in his teaching-cum-coaching career he hardly had a spare minute. Kidney trained a schools side on Monday afternoons, a club side on Tuesday nights, another schools session on Wednesday, Thursday refereeing a game, more club work on Friday night, maybe two games on a Saturday, including the club, and another with the school's firsts on Sunday. Yet he says he's busier now, as this is a 12-month job, and given his famed attention to detail you don't doubt him when he says he's had a fortnight holidays since he took the Munster job.

And what's in it for him? "Three aims really: to try to enjoy myself because if I'm not seen to enjoy myself then the players can't be enjoying themselves; to help the players try and achieve their own targets, and to win. But in that order."