Interview/Brian Kerr: The Stade de France hulks a surprisingly understated elegance out in the stressed Parisian suburb of St Denis. The most casual fan is accustomed by now to the sight of the simple but somehow beautiful roof which hovers like a halo above the stands, yet every sight of it is spine-tinglingly special. It is one of those venues. One of those cities.

It is Friday afternoon. Brian Kerr and Noel O'Reilly are down conferring on the carpet of grass which is the heart of this place. Their players are running through meticulous drills and calling to each other across the echoing emptiness of the stadium.

You look at Kerr and O'Reilly again and in your head you know that they are talking soccer, that they are planning and plotting, but in your heart you hope that they are looking into each other with half-hidden grins wondering how did it ever come to this, how did a shared passion lead them here from the Leinster Senior League and parts more remote to this cathedral which will soon be graced by some of the greatest players in the world in a game which will be watched by 30,000 ordinary shams from home.

They should be sitting on lawnchairs in the centre circle and clinking glasses with each other. They should be doing gentle laps of honour. They should be taking snaps of each other at the summit.

How they got here is a story for later, though. They don't see this as a summit. It's a challenge, the same absorbing challenge that teams have always been. Right now the exigencies of the challenge are tugging at their sleeves. They part from each other and go among the players, whispering, talking, cajoling, tinkering.

When the session ends, more duties are stacked in a holding pattern above Brian Kerr's head. He comes to a room beneath the stands in the company of Matt Holland and Shay Given. It's the day before a match and nothing much gets said, but by the time the press business is finished and the TV people have been sated, another 55 minutes of Kerr's day have been filched. Funny thing is, nobody is happy. Not the media. Not Kerr.

Finally he escapes the carping and the questions and returns to the refuge of the team. The boys are staying well away from the clatter and clamour of Paris in the quiet, lakeside suburb of Enghien Les Bains, holed up in a small, refined hotel of just 36 rooms, every one of which has been commandeered. Soft string music suffuses the lobby where, looking lost in the glorious oversized chairs, Gary Breen and Kenny Cunningham are playing cards. Roy Keane and Stephen Carr and Graham Kavanagh are still lunching. Kevin Kilbane and Clinton Morrison pass towards the lifts joshing people playfully.

"Ray Treacy, lookin' like a gangsta!"

They all have the serene faces of men on some kind of spiritual retreat. There was a moment on Wednesday night, when the players were eating together and the staff attached to the squad were conspiring in a neighbouring room, when Kerr felt himself drawn by the sound of laughter. He went and had a fatherly peep, saw a roomful of players cackling and horselaughing and having a good time. Perhaps he gave a wink to the other staff when he came back to their table. Certainly he was pleased.

"I'm really chuffed at how the group is coming around. I never heard so much laughing at a dinner table as I heard last night. I heard it in Switzerland, but last night there was so much laughter and craic between them. I looked out at the mixture of the groups and thought that they were really coming together as a gang of players. They looked so happy in each other's company, they seem to be understanding each other's qualities and what everyone brings to the group and the party. There's a lot of diversity and experience and backgrounds there. "

There is, and at times in recent memory there has been perhaps too much diversity and not enough space to accommodate it. The team which Kerr inherited was but a smoking ruin of what his predecessor had hoped to build. There's a certain triumph in the restoration of unity. Some wounds will never heal, but Kerr has been adroit enough to get people to move on. He has accomplished this while bringing his own beliefs and methods to the table.

The first step was to tread softly. With footballers you tread not just on their dreams but on their egos and their insecurities.

"The team had been built by Mick and they'd had success, and Mick had been with them for a good long time. He had definitely developed the team well and brought in a lot of the younger players into it. I got his younger players when I came in. You inherit the system, the structure, the way they played, the way they prepared for matches. Everything.

"You come into a change-over, and it's not so much that you are trying to put your own stamp on it but you are trying to do it your own way. You have to be conscious of the fact that you can't change things very dramatically or very quickly.

"Fellas have been in good habits which have been successful for them. I couldn't afford to say that was all wrong, do it this way now. Gradually you bring things in."

So almost without notice the velvet revolution has taken place and an Irish team which should have been in recession for half a decade, at least, comes to France with a fighting chance of getting the sort of away result which would be a landmark in domestic history. The streets of Paris are littered with brand-new green Umbro shirts (almost 20,000 sold in a day last week), and for every beery Irish song that gets sung there is a dolorous Frenchman who will relate the tragedy that is the sudden and unexpected death of his national side. It's the kind of hap-hap-happy build-up which could see the unwary visitors getting tonked three-nil.

"It's too optimistic," says Kerr. "I get a sense of it. It's stupid. You see their team and it might bring people back to their senses. They're not calling up fellas from the local equivalent of the Leinster Senior Leagues. They're not dead in the water. We have a sense of the optimism surrounding this game, and it's something we have to deal with when we talk to the players."

Dealing with that and dealing with relations with the big bad world has been a priority. Kerr pays microscopic attention to logistical detail. The hotel has to be right. The schedule has to be comfortable. No surprises. No upsets. No swings. No roundabouts. He's enjoying this campaign better than the last.

"We're better organised. I like that. In the first campaign we went to Georgia and Albania in my first couple of competitive matches and I had no role in agreeing to the fixtures or the dates or anything to do with where we went or how we played. I got there, everything had to be done. Until you were into it you had no clear idea about the number of things which had to be done and dealt with around those matches."

That pattern continued right through the campaign. It eased with two home games, and then the crunch with Switzerland in Basel came on with its own problems.

"This time around we have had longer to think and to plan. All aspects, all fixtures, dates, when we wanted to play certain teams. That allows you to adjust mentally. It's more comfortable.

"We enjoyed the build-up to Switzerland more. We changed arrangements this time for Basel. We went later and controlled the training ground. We did that through Chris's (Hughton) contacts with Christian Gross. Stuff like that. The last time a lot of that stuff had been done in advance. The flight arrangements were that we were going on the Thursday morning and the Swiss FA would give us a training ground, and the next day we'd train in the stadium at the time they'd say. This time around we had more of a chance to work the details ourselves and agree what's best for us all.

"The first time in Basel, in the build-up to the game with where we stayed - there were so many people around. The number of people who wanted little bits of you, little bits of the players. Only little bits, but it all adds up. This time we allowed ourselves the time to concentrate on the game. Any compromise has been cast aside. We do what we think is right."

This time around he wanted to play the Swiss early on because the first date in Basel had been traumatic and the memory of it was still there hanging around.

"People were talking about it. It was a landmark in people's memories. We lost that match. We didn't qualify. It was a disaster. We didn't get through. I wanted to play them early and kill that and then move on."

So to Paris.

His team have had only four competitive away games. Albania, Georgia, and the Swiss twice. None of the performances in foreign fields has been as he would have liked. Funnily, Georgia, the first one, was in many ways the closest the team has come to satisfying him.

"I thought we had good control in the game, They equalised in the second half and it could have got difficult. We took control again, though, and deserved to win. Maybe the other teams were better, but that was the best. From the friendlies, the Dutch match stands out as the best.

"We don't have the players for those performances though. We don't have the natural balance or the luxury of having everyone right on the right day. We don't have the correct combination of players to play the away game properly, the way I would think it should be played. I think we should have a target man, a real target player which would allow us to play it a bit differently than we are."

There's nobody coming through, though, nobody constructed to the traditional, architectural specifications of a Niall Quinn or a Tony Cascarino. There's not even a lad in with planning permission for duty as a tower. So Kerr improvises.

"You take what you have and it allows you to do other things. It challenges you to be different. I'm not unhappy with the way we are playing now. Away games are a different challenge. I like the away games. I like that challenge, as opposed to the home games where people expect us to have the ball all the time and there's oohs and ahhs when the other team have an attack. The mindset is funny. At least against France people won't be surprised that they will have a lot of the ball."

The absence of surprise has been a cornerstone of his plans. On weekends like this his attention to detail is unsurpassed. He went to three French games during the summer and had their last three matches watched, one, versus Bosnia, by Dave Bowman, the other two against Israel and the Faroes by Lou Macari. Even so, when the plague struck France and they were forced into their team selection there was an excuse for raised eyebrows. Not for Kerr.

"It was the team that looked obvious. Patrice Evra had played the last three games at full back and I thought he might have stayed with him, but when I saw Silvestre in the squad I was thinking that he had an awful lot of caps to be just sitting on the bench so he'd probably come in. You look at the team, there's nobody in the subs who has played a lot before. It's the most experienced combination of the collection they have. It looked the most obvious team."

Even Rio Antonio Mavuba, the Bordeaux midfielder winning just his second cap, has a place in the rolodex of Kerr's mind. He watched him play a bit for the French under-21s in the Toulon tournament and picked him out on his debut versus Bosnia.

"He's a defensive midfield player, strong and leggy. Bit of a Vieira sort of player but not as big and physically imposing yet. He's 20. Once the squad was named I thought he'd probably play, but Diarra was in there with a shout. I thought perhaps they might let Pires go inside, as I expected Giuly to play if he wasn't injured. I thought maybe Giuly and Wiltord, with Pires inside. He's played in there before in a 4-4-2. In the end no real surprises though."

No surprises. No ambushes. He has been free to work with his players. He suggested to Roy Keane following the birth of the player's fifth child last Thursday week that he stay at home in Manchester until Wednesday. He'd acceded to Manchester United's request that John O'Shea and Liam Miller not train for two days after their weekend game. Everyone on board is kept happy.

"Roy?" you ask. Interested.

"Roy," he says, knowing it's inevitable. "I'm delighted how it's going. The whole thing. Roy seems to be very comfortable in the group. It's not fair for me to say any more than that, because I wasn't part of the past. He seems to be very comfortable with his role. I don't know how he was or it was before, but he's performed the role I would have hoped he would."

And he moves on smoothly.

"We did a team meeting at half-10 on Wednesday before we went training. It was the first meeting of the week, setting a little bit of a tone, putting down our attitude. We had 24 players. Eleven would play. Six would be on the subs lists. Seven would have nothing to do. Eleven play from the start. That's all. That's 13 who won't start. A lot of people. Everyone has to understand their role, everyone has to be supportive. Everyone has to understand the team thing. Everyone has to respect that. We all want to get to the same place."

On Wednesday, when they worked, they emphasised the plans for when they had possession. How they would like to use the ball, what the priorities were, how to use it in defence and through the middle, what they needed from the front. That was the majority of the session.

Then that night they went to see Mama Mia. There has been a renaissance in the social life of the team. Before the last home game they travelled en masse to Shelbourne Park to the dogs. On the night of the Cyprus match, Kenny Cunningham and Andy O'Brien had asked if it would be alright to have some musicians out to the hotel for a sing-song. Kerr said fine, so long as it was in the non-smoking and non-drinking section of the bar. It was. The players organised the musicians. Kerr and his staff came along. A memorable night.

Mama Mia worked a charm. On Thursday, they left later for training than they had planned, the day having been longer than anyone could have feared. Training didn't begin till after six, but the session stretched and stretched.

"We were going to do an hour, but we had a Dubs versus Culchies match which got serious. Noel reffed, and he was in the middle getting all sorts of abuse. Clinton was a Dub, though he wasn't sure. 'It's Dublin innit, Brian?' I said, 'Yeah . . . well, you're north county, which is half-and-half'."

Afterwards he sat down with Packie Bonner and Chris Hughton and Noel and Brian McCarthy, the video man, and they talked about their team and the French team till midnight. No stone left unturned and vice versa.

Now it's mid-afternoon on the day before the biggest game of his life and the world is looking for a piece of him. There's a call on the lobby phone. There's a man waiting out there too who has been supplying him with titbits about the French for the past few months. He likes to have a sleeper in every country he visits.

Then there is the second video showing for the players. So far they've seen the French in selected cuts of action. They now have to see individual segments concerning players. And then individual sequences of themselves in action, so everyone can jeer and slag but everyone can feel good about themselves.

He gets up from the table where he has been sitting for some time, gathers up his hefty sheaf of notes and documents, glances at his mobile to see how many messages have mounted up and goes off to face the world again.

A good man in Paris, a pilgrim in a cathedral of his faith, hoping for good things.