Keith Duggan chats with a Williams who is just as high-aiming, long-serving and unerring as the tennis duo

"A coach that I was friends with, Gordon Hunt, he got seriously ill. And his team thought he wouldn't make it through the season. So they sacked him. You just think to yourself, 'what are these bastards doing'. And they think they are the game. They are not.

No-one is the game." - Matt Williams.

In 1966, Teddy Williams took his youngest son to see three rugby games over one particular weekend that, from a distance, seem of phosphorescent importance when that childhood is considered.

Firstly, they watched Eastwood, the local team and practitioners of bread and butter rugby. In the middle came the thrill of seeing his older brothers play. And finally, la pièce de résistance, a test match in Sydney, a pageant of such scale and colour the six-year-old could hardly comprehend.

And, although he scarcely knew the rules, the sport he saw made sense. They used to joke in the Williams house that Matty learned to count by match programmes - 15 to nine, one to eight. Dawn and Teddy moved to the young neighbourhood after the second World War when the factories offered security and a decent standard of living. By the time the baby-boomer generation arrived in the 1950s and 60s, Eastwood was a perfect place: a stone's throw from the bright lights, but closer in spirit to the countryside.

A short train ride bridged both realities and Matt Williams was at once comfortable with Sydney's urban attractions and at home in the bush, where there were kangaroos and creeks to swim in and a constant, arid heat that you could almost hear.

Fleetingly, when not concentrating on the possibilities of the oval ball, Matt Williams thinks of that time. If there is one thing he has learned in his 43 years it's that life never tires of surprising. He is constantly surprised that his old man is no longer around. His children surprise him.

And, these days, when the sun dips behind Lansdowne and he stands perfectly contented in the middle of a Leinster training session, he realises that he is surprised to be there.

He believes this team - these people - are the finest he's ever worked with and even as he prepares for the high of today's game, he is reconciled to the fact he is just passing through.

"When I left New South Wales, it was sad, really sad. Ten years is a long time and there is a period of mourning in it. The trouble is, once you sign up for anywhere, you ultimately have to go. The day I signed my first contract, someone told me I have also just signed for the day I had to leave. And it's true."

But that is fine with Matt Williams.

His all-time favourite story is of an Australian cricketer who, after earning his first cap for New South Wales, was advised by his father to "make sure the game is better for you having been there".

If he has a philosophy regarding rugby, that would be it. As he sees it, the game is fine, it is the stuff that orbits it that gets messy. He has a story from his days as head coach of NSW that reminds him of how essentially absurd his life can be.

He picked up a copy of a national newspaper one Monday morning and, on the front page, under the mast-line, were three mug-shots. One was of the Port Arthur assassin. The next was of a politician up for embezzlement. Then came Matt Williams.

"We had lost three games. And I was looking at this, thinking, Jeez, I'm in a bit of trouble here. It was so surreal. We miss a penalty and I end up alongside these two bastards. So much for perspective."

Perhaps that's why Chris-Anne Williams can be so wary of the sport that has consumed her husband for as long as she has known him. When he rang her from Ireland with a proposal around the time of the 1999 World Cup, she was vexed, but not surprised.

Offered a chance to get involved with Leinster, he was inclined to accept it on a whim and, just like that, the Williams family came to live in the country from which all four of his grandparents had fled. It was a time of great unsettlement anyway as Kim Williams, the brother Matt was closest to, had died suddenly and young.

"The way it happened, it was just awful. He was playing some golf with mates and lost the grip in his left hand and they took him to hospital and we learned it was a tumour and that he had 28 days. And true enough, he died about 28 days later.

"And I - none of us - could conceive of something like this happening to someone in perfect health that we believed to be, like us all, immortal. And naturally, it made me rethink my life. Made me see how lucky I was. And I think it is one of the reasons I am here today."

Of all the Williamses, Matt was probably the most interested in his ancestry. The disparate tales of his antecedents are full of the usual adventure and dire circumstance.

"My grandmother's father was involved in the uprising of 1916 so they all had to skip. The other one, a Catholic, married a Protestant so they thought it best to leave. My grandfather Ryan from Limerick left through abject poverty. It's only coming back that you appreciate it because, in Australia, there was a feeling you left it behind.

"The past was never mentioned, it was all about assimilation. I can see now that we had a traditional Catholic Irish upbringing, but really, at that time, your background was hidden.

"And I do see the irony of me coming back here now and actually living in the same county as my grandmother was born in."

What the past did give him was an Irish passport. If anything, that just complicated matters. Establishing a presence in the age of tribunals was no easy thing. The mere act of getting a phone or opening a bank account was a nightmare for the man hired to transform Leinster's back-line.

Then there was the rugby.

His first game was against Munster at Donnybrook on the eve of the World Cup final and 1,500 people showed up.

At home, Lauren and Teddy and Sabrina were wondering why they were in a country where it was always wet and dark and he was looking at his new team firing beer around in the showers after a game and thinking, "wow, we have a long way to go here".

Is today the biggest in the life of Matt Williams, rugby coach?

"Ask Alex Ferguson - who I am not comparing myself to, by the way - is the game against Real Madrid the biggest and he will say yes. It's always the next game. Look, this is huge, but you have to keep it in perspective or else the event becomes so big that you freeze."

This is just an hour or so before United will be torn apart in the Bernabeu Stadium. Williams is upstairs in the Lansdowne clubhouse, the last man remaining other than the caretaker.

Leinster's afternoon session ran late but went well. Williams spent most of the 90 minutes standing in the centre of the field, watching Roly Meates fuss around the densely packed scrum like a sculptor shaping art, then watching Willie Anderson, and then the backs running drills.

The only time he speaks is to warn the backs not to take it into contact. The surface is like rock.

The session runs like clockwork and afterwards the stars change into flip-flops and exit quickly, gear bags in one hand, car keys in the other, their surnames still on their training shirts. Miller. O'Driscoll. O'Kelly. Marquee names now. Like the rest of the country, they are chasing home to watch the soccer match.

Williams says he will get home, maybe go for a run and catch up with his children. He will keep an eye on the soccer. But although it is going on seven o'clock, he is happy to talk about Leinster for a while.

"My wife said to me one day, 'you know, these guys will go the extra mile for you'. And it is very true. There is a family feeling here. It's high integrity. It's old-fashioned in a way. It's the way rugby ought to be. We had an open day here not so long ago and it got completely out of hand, literally thousands of kids.

"And the guys stood signing autographs for nearly three hours and, afterwards, not one complained. It's a small thing, but it matters."

In Leinster, he recognises theuncorrupted soul of the game. Sure, there is money and a high regime of professionalism, but he believes the deeper principles still matter.

One of the quirks he has introduced is that, before every match, a legend of the game hands out the Leinster jerseys to each of the players.

It is based on the old notion of the Australian cricket cap, traditionally the toughest honour to win in sport in that country. The idea was that a Leinster jersey should be coveted.

So Jack Kyle was brought in. And Fergus Slattery, Phil Orr, Brendan Mullin. One time, Williams asked DJ Carey to do the honours and found the Kilkenny man completely delightful.

A few curmudgeons phoned up to complain, but Leinster won and the complaints dried up. The players loved and bought it. Just as they bought Williams's affable and charming manner, the way he calls people 'mate' and seems to mean it.

His first message, delivered in his easy and friendly tone, was, change your ways or you go. Wise up. Get serious. And the players listened because it was clear he meant business. And, three-and-a-half years later, they fill Lansdowne Road.

"See, part of the beauty of this Leinster thing is that it is so steeped in tradition," he says. "It doesn't have the provincial feel of Montferrand or even Munster, but the city was waiting for something to happen."

Ask Matt Williams what his one wish is and instinctively it will be to defeat Biarritz. But in the bigger picture, he hopes that this is just the beginning of something.

"See, I'd love to come back here in 20 years time and see this team that I was part of setting up still powerful, with a brand new stadium. To come back for a reunion and sit in the Brian O'Driscoll room or the Denis Hickie room. And maybe a Matt Williams cubicle out the back.

"I don't know what this group of players will achieve, but I feel certain that their character as men is beyond question. And you have to keep a pastoral side to this. Don't think its going to last forever, you know. It's very short."

It's like he says. No-one is the game. It's just that the game is better for some people having been there.