World Youth Championship: "When the golden goal went in," said Gerry Smith of Colombia's winner on Tuesday night, "it was like doing 10 years in prison and then walking out and getting a smack of a bus." Laughter all 'round, writes Mary Hannigan in Al-Ain.

"Did you like that one, Johnny?" Smith asked his assistant, who was hiding from the sun, of which he clearly had had enough.

"I wasn't concentrating, what did you say?" asked McDonnell, squinting, searching the skies in the hope of spotting an advancing cloud. "I got the bus, what was before that?" More laughter.

"Were you driving the bus, Johnny?" asked Smith.

"Na, I was driving the coach," winked the man who has driven Smith through the World Youth Cup for the past two weeks, as Smith himself insists.

"Johnny's a fantastic coach, he was my eyes and ears here, great at the training sessions, which the players really enjoyed, and that's a credit to him. A great fella."

As of now, though, Smith and McDonnell's involvement in the international youth scene is at an end. Whether they are called upon again to take charge of an underage team is, says Smith, "out of his hands".

"John and I would like to be involved again at some stage, but it's not our decision. It was a great adventure, a great time and the players seemed to enjoy working with us.

"Did we make any mistakes? Well, I think when you win your group and you're only beaten by a golden goal by one of the favourites, that shows the mistakes were minimal. You'll always go to bed at night wondering if we'd done this, that or the other would it have been different, but we tried to get the best out of the players and I think that's what we did."

Smith, who also coaches the Irish junior team, admitted he would be interested in taking up an eircom League managerial post, if one presented itself, despite his work commitments.

"I've a business to run back home and the way the eircom League is at the moment it's nearly a seven-day-a-week, 24-hours-a-day job. I haven't thought about it just yet, but if it's a 'yes' or 'no' answer you want I'd probably say 'yes', at some stage. I'm sure if something came up I'd find the time to do it."

Would you relish getting involved in football at this level again?

"Definitely," said McDonnell, assistant manager at Shelbourne, "it gives you an appetite for it. Of course I'd love to do something like this again, but at the moment my priorities are with Shelbourne, we have pre-season in January, we've Champions League qualifiers down the line, all that. But if it does come up again I wouldn't have worries about being able to do the job, I know I can do it now."

Regrets, though, there were a few at the team hotel "the morning after the night before", as Smith put it, the air heavy with the feeling that if Ireland had played in the first half as they had done in the second against the Colombians they would now be preparing for an eminently winnable quarter-final against the United Arab Emirates.

"We would really have fancied our chances against the UAE, I think we could have been looking at a semi-final spot," said Smith, "so we're disappointed that we didn't do that for, as the song goes, 'the folks back home'. But it wasn't to be."

And what does the future hold for this crop of Irish under-20 players? "Well, they're going into the real world now, they're not boys any more, they're men," said McDonnell. "They've got to map out their lives, where they're going, what they want to do. They have to start being selfish about their careers, deciding what's best for them, and we've spoken to them about that.

"They've got to think about whether they can make a life out of this, make some money, they're crossing that bridge now. I believe they'll all make a career out of playing football, but at what level you just don't know, but they definitely all have a chance."

How many will eventually make it into Brian Kerr's senior squad is the, as yet, unanswerable question, although Stephen Kelly, Darren Potter, Willo Flood and Stephen Elliott remain top of the "most likely to succeed" list, despite mixed fortunes in the past fortnight.

"There are good players there, but that call will be made by the senior manager, they're out of our loop now, they're moving on," said Smith. "They've acquitted and handled themselves well, they've competed and held their own against the best in the world at their age, it's up to Brian (Kerr) to assess them now.

"All the lads got on the pitch, no one can ever take that away from them, every player that we brought out played in the World Cup and to me that was so important. They mightn't fully appreciate it now, but in years to come they'll be able to sit down with their kids or their grandkids and say, 'I played in a World Cup'."

Irish player of the tournament? Some wonderful moments from Flood and Elliott, memorable cameos from Eamon Zayed and Keith Fahey, some great goalkeeping from Wayne Henderson and Brian Murphy and gutsy defending from Paddy McCarthy and Stephen Kelly.

Hard, though, to look beyond the stirring contribution of Longford Town defender Stephen Paisley, especially considering the disappointments and injuries he's suffered at club level the past year. He began to believe he wasn't good enough for this squad in the build-up to the tournament, so low was his confidence. A few top-class tackles and two goals in his first two games and he began to believe in himself again. As Johnny McDonnell put it, he "arrived here as a boy, and left as a man".

Maybe that's what the World Youth Cup is all about.