Kevin Fennelly was warned that it wasn't the time to take on the Kilkenny hurlers. A creditable championship campaign had disintegrated into a demoralising defeat in last year's National League semi-final.

Not that losing out in the league broke hearts in the county but the crowd's ugly barracking of manager Nicky Brennan and the listlessness of the players made for a depressing postscript to the season.

As a player he had also suffered from poor timing. A goalkeeper coming through as Noel Skehan was succeeding Ollie Walsh, Fennelly had great under-age success, winning All-Irelands at minor and twice at under-21. In tribute to his perseverance, he made a couple of All-Ireland final appearances in attack but by the time he inherited the number one jersey, Kilkenny had stopped winning All-Irelands.

He has, however, been 20 years a coach. He started in 1977, in his early 20s, as a selector on the minor All-Ireland winning team captained by his brother Sean. He has worked continually on the club circuit and maintains that he always knew he would get a go at the county team even if the opportunity arose more quickly than expected.

But by February of this year, what had originally looked like a poisoned chalice was beginning to resemble something less pretty and more capacious - a septic tank.

The announcement by DJ Carey that he was going to retire caused a sensation. From being three players short of winning an All-Ireland, Kilkenny were - according to local speculation - now five short.

Although Fennelly never appeared to give the prospect of the player's retirement full credence, there were complications for him in the rumours which swept the county about his role in prompting the decision.

He had trained Carey's club in the county championship and conspiracy theories abounded that the treatment of Carey's brother Jack had caused a rift between Fennelly and the family. The new Kilkenny manager was quick to reject the allegations but became increasingly irritated at the intrusion of the controversy into his preparation for the start of the season.

Even after Carey's return, other thorny problems remained. The need to pension off some of the survivors from the All-Ireland successes of 1992 and '93 proved contentious, injuries plagued the panel and the team's form ranged from poor to dreadful in the league.

For a man who had set himself the target of winning an All-Ireland within 10 months of his appointment, this was a trying time. What on earth persuaded him that an All-Ireland was on the agenda for a team in such straits?

"I think that they'd a better chance of winning this year's All-Ireland than they have of winning next year's All-Ireland. A lot of players are getting a bit older. There's half the old side and half a bunch of young lads coming in. Pat O'Neill, DJ Carey, Willie O'Connor, Liam Keoghan - they'd be getting to the other side.

"These fellas, they're going to be a big loss and in a year or two we're going to have to replace them. And the young lads coming in haven't the experience of playing in an All-Ireland. So all in all, I didn't see why this year wasn't the year we should be aiming at."

But surely he must have had second thoughts as the season unfolded.

"Yeah. They were beaten in the Leinster final last year but only beaten by four points in the (All-Ireland) semi-final, so I didn't think things were as bad as people were saying. But saying that, we started at a lot lower a stage than they were at in the All-Ireland semi-final last year and that bothered me.

"I thought we'd pick it up easier but we didn't. We found it very hard to get back to even where they were last year. It took us until about a month or six weeks ago to get back even to that stage. And that bothered me a lot, that the progress was very slow."

As manager Fennelly has always presented a gruff air of at times baffling confidence. After the All-Ireland semi-final defeat of Waterford, he could be found in the dressingroom telling local radio that he was always satisfied they could win the match. From the moment he had finished watching the opposition on video, some days previously, that was that. No elation, just calm certainty.

Not that he'd be exactly laid back. A fortnight before Kilkenny's opening championship match against Dublin - a match viewed with trepidation at the time despite the massive win that eventuated - Fennelly upbraided GAA Director General Liam Mulvihill because the county's relegation play-off with Antrim (still unplayed) had been postponed unbeknownst to Kilkenny until someone spotted it on Aertel.

When he looks back on the progress of recent months, improbable to most but perfectly logical to him, Fennelly recalls the last league match as being the lowest point of his year and charts the improvement through the summer.

"We hurled alright against Waterford in Waterford in the vital league match on a spilling wet day. But they hammered us in the end, bet us out of Walsh Park and yet we felt we had hurled reasonably well. At that stage I decided Waterford were a force and that they would beat Tipperary but I was a bit disappointed that day.

"The Dublin game was the one which showed we weren't as bad as people were saying. We won it in great fashion, went and won it easy. That in itself was going over the top because Dublin weren't doing themselves justice on the day and we got any breaks that were going.

"I was always worried about the Laois game and I was happy that we just scraped over them because it was one that worried me a lot."

Laois apparently worried him more than the higher-profile difficulties earlier in the year. Carey's retirement?

"That didn't worry me as much as Laois worried me with seven minutes to go when they were three points ahead. The DJ thing I always thought would come right but I worried about the fact that he did retire, that there's a reason for everything. That bothered me more than anything else. DJ's too good a player to lose or even to half-lose. If he retired, maybe there was something on his mind and that bothered me."

Yet, post-comeback, the player hasn't exactly sparkled. One of the many inexplicable phenomena surrounding Fennelly's first year is that he has a team in the All-Ireland despite a consistently below-par contribution from the county's most celebrated hurler.

"DJ would be the first to admit that. But he could have been great against Offaly and not scored 2-3 or 2-4. But yeah, out of play he hasn't been playing that well this year. He worked extremely hard against Waterford but he didn't have to work as hard as that last year or the year before because he seemed to be that yard faster.

"If he could get back half a yard, he'd be back to where he was. If he could, I'd be much happier about the All-Ireland than I am at the moment."

He is less troubled by the controversial clear-out of older players in the spring.

"Well, you see at the end of the day we hadn't beaten Wexford or Offaly for four years at Croke Park. We got the job coming in here, Dick (O'Neill) and Mick (McCarthy) and myself, in a situation where we had been in an All-Ireland semi-final last year but hadn't won Leinster and indeed hadn't won Leinster since 1993.

"Changes had to be made, decisions had to be made. We had to get rid of a few. That's business. There's nothing we could do. I make no apologies for doing that. Maybe - fellas will argue - we should have done this, we should have done that. At the end of the day you never know.

"If we win, nothing is wrong. If we lose, someone will find something wrong. There was a lot of flak. But I didn't mind that. That'll always be the way. People pay their money and are entitled to their opinions and I have my opinion. The situation at the moment is that my opinion matters and that's it."

Judging by the frequency with which it crops up in his memories of the season, the close call against Laois made quite an impression, both in prospect and during the match's closing stages.

"I was worried about Laois. I didn't mind about people saying that when DJ retired, I'd have to go, and all that bullshit. That didn't bother me. I'd the job and that was it. But yeah, against Laois when things started going wrong in the second half I remember thinking to myself as I passed the Hill - and fellas shouted in, eh, things that people would say if you were beaten - about the following morning and going into work, meeting people after getting bet against Laois.

"And it wouldn't have been nice but that's it. At the end of the day, if it happens it happens. There's nothing you can do about it. I would find it hard to handle, yes. Nobody likes getting bet. I mean if you like getting bet, you shouldn't be training teams. But life goes on."

The suggestion that his team hasn't really been firing on all cylinders this season elicits a tart response.

"There's a lot of teams in the country that fired on all cylinders and they're not in the championship. I'm only training a team to win an All-Ireland the best way I know how. You pick your team and get them to hurl the way you want.

"How good are we, like? I mean maybe we're very well to be in an All-Ireland with the team we have. Maybe we're doing very well. At the end of the day name a team that have blossomed this year. Offaly were wrote off, Kilkenny haven't blossomed but the rest of the teams are out of the championship."

"At the end of the day, the way you hurl doesn't really matter. It's the result that matters. Anyone who says any different is only codding themselves. I never heard a fella talking about a great All-Ireland that they lost. It's all about winning and if we win the All-Ireland, I don't care what sort of game it is."