Gaelic Games Interview with Mick O'Dwyer: Keith Duggan on how Mick O'Dwyer's practical magic has turned Laois's footballers into believers

Where would Mick O'Dwyer rank among the greatest Kerry men? Already, his singsong name is so rich in deed and myth that the youth in his voice, the eternal freshness, is always a surprise.

Mick has been at the heart of so many great GAA stories in the last century that years ago, he might have unveiled a bronze statue of himself and rested on his laurels in Waterville. Yet the mere notion of stopping irritates and, one suspects, frightens him.

Great players who started life as gazelles under O'Dwyer in the green and gold of Kerry or the all white of Kildare learned and grew and, if lucky, touched the complete possibilities in their game for a short time and then accepted their inevitable fading. You see many of them now and they are half way to becoming old men but O'Dwyer is changeless.

Study any of the evocative Croke Park dug-out photographs from All-Ireland finals days when men with cameras roamed the lines with impunity and the face is the same. The amused features, a mat of thick black hair well into the process of silvering. O'Dwyer can be vague with numbers but it is safe to say he is around pensionable age.

"Maybe 66 - he can tell the odd fib about things like that," laughs Laois selector Declan O'Loughlin.

Tomorrow will be his 40-somethingth national final - 47, O'Dwyer himself reckons, but he stopped counting years ago. The coming together of Laois's many lost boys, adrift in the big bad world after their great minor escapades and this ageless Jedi figure from the spiritual source of Gaelic football has been the first remarkable story of the new season.

It is tempting to imagine O'Dwyer turning up to train his protégès not with a pair of football boots in his hand but a wooden staff. To see Micko standing in a lonely field somewhere in Laois, his hands held over a suspended orb and light dancing on the faces of all the wonderful footballers that have been found again, marvelling at the future he has conjured up in the crystal. Mick is at that venerable age where all the talk is of his aura.

The man himself sighs as he considers this unfortunate aspect of success. "Well, there has been a lot of talk about magic and all this type of shite," he hisses. "But the fact is we have been lucky, very lucky, in four or five games. We won a few by a point, scraped a few draws and things went well. I seem to be pretty lucky at the moment."

But the gods only dispense so much luck on any one mortal. Fortune's accountants must have had O'Dwyer's store of luck running empty around 1979. There is more to his dramatic reversal with one of the most chronically under-achieving counties of the last decade than mere happy circumstance.

"Sure why wouldn't he do it?" challenges Davy Dalton.

"The players were always in Laois and everyone knew that. Sure he came to us in Kildare and took us a long way in the league in our first season and we had no stars at all. There is loads of talent in Laois and it was a matter of Mick coming in and harnessing it."

Latent talent was the message O'Loughlin and co hammered home to O'Dwyer when they went to pitch the idea of a season at O'Moore Park. Twenty lads with minor medals hanging out the ass pocket of their jeans. Young, hungry and eternally stuck where two roads diverge in a yellow wood. Come and guide them, Mick.

"At the same time," O'Loughlin admits now, "I was nervous because I was wondering if we really were as good as we felt. After the first game in the O'Byrne Cup against Longford, we were fierce flat. But Mick just said you had to wait for form to come and sure enough, things began to transpire exactly as he said they would."

That maudlin and uninspiring afternoon was not lost on O'Dwyer. Not many turned up in O'Moore Park for what was a dreadful game against Longford and those who departed were none too enchanted by what they had seen. But O'Dwyer was relaxed and cheerful in the tunnel when the game finished, reminiscing on his 50th year involved in Gaelic games and reckoning Laois would be fine.

"He has been exactly the tonic these players needed," says O'Loughlin. "He introduced a regime of strictness and discipline that was new to them and that they responded to. These are mostly young and fairly impressionable lads. And as someone in Kildare remarked, he will do a good job of turning them into gentlemen also. Mick is a non-smoker, a non-drinker and he has a great sense of humour, a way of relating to people in a way that makes them want to react to him."

Listening to any of Laois's young tyros speaking of the maestro now is to hear the voices of converts. Days before Laois defeated All-Ireland champions Armagh in the league semi-final, Colm Parkinson, hip and restless and out of love with the game for a period that was close to permanent, marvelled that "ya could talk to Micko about anything. Anything." O'Dwyer just smiled at the mention of his bottled lightning at a press conference during the week.

"Young Parkinson. He was over in New York for two years and I would think he was as good as gone from the game. He came up to me after a county final and said 'What's the story Mick?' I said 'If you are back in January, you will be on the panel'. 'I'll be back in January,' he said. And he was."

And that is how one of Laois's most problematic and unsettled souls came home. As O'Dwyer sees it, simplicity is the key. When he started off training the Kerry team, he reckons he hadn't a clue what he was at. So he set them jogging around a field, fretting because there was about five PE teachers on the squad.

"All highly educated in the subject of physical education and I was looking at them and wondering. But I never once asked them anything in training. I just ran them and had them playing football and used what practical experience I had. I had a few trips across the water, all right, to look at a few things. The ban was in vogue at that time and I suppose if they heard about it, I wouldn't be training teams at all today. But I ended up with Matt Busby and his gang a few times and had a look at what they were doing. It gave me a good insight into what professional football was about and that helped me in a way.

"But as well as that, I had 18 years playing football with Kerry and I just applied what I learned from that and worked the players hard and that's what I would put it down to."

Dalton remembers the sharpness of the training sessions. Focused and with heavy emphasis on the ball and players clambering over each other to try to please O'Dwyer.

"Of course you'd want to, that was the nature of the man. And plus, you wanted to play."

Laois have a second 15 now that are a pretty formidable unit in their own right. Always at the cutting edge, O'Dwyer has embraced the expanded substitutes like few other managers and has already clarified his intention to use 20 men tomorrow. So for young players, there is more to play for and less a sense that they are there merely to make up the numbers.

Humour is O'Dwyer's great weapon at training. From the first night he turned up, he has bristled with energy and a bright mood that caught spark in the dressing-room and remained for the 90 minutes in the cold, under floodlights. He took the drudgery out of the winter, when league finals were not being entertained.

A story has caught on about one of Laois's maiden sessions under O'Dwyer. It was a foul night, blacker than soot and a monsoon had positioned itself directly above O'Moore Park. The players were running laps, drenched and bedraggled and huddled close, thoroughly cleansed of adolescent notions of grandeur, of anything other than a will to get through the night. O'Dwyer stood by himself, visible only in silhouette, unmoved by the gale or the cold.

"The lads are loving it, Mick," someone called. The Kerryman turned in the darkness with feline shards for eyes. "F**k the lads. I'm loving it."

In 1986, when Laois won the league, they partied for a fortnight and then, feeling lordly and optimistic, they journeyed down to Aughrim to school Wicklow in the ways of championship football and were beaten. It is widely accepted the Laois minors celebrated in the spirit of Nero after their All-Irelands of 1996 and 1997.

After tomorrow's league final, Laois will go home and meet for training the next evening and discuss their championship game against Wexford. All through the league, O'Dwyer has kept it low-key and so it will remain.

Dalton reckons he might head up to Croke Park to see O'Dwyer on the great stage again. He says he knew him well enough to chat to in the Kildare days but inevitably they don't see so much of each other anymore. But he can't get over how little the Kerry man has changed since his first days with Kildare.

"He's still the exact same. Still as cute as a fox."