"WELL," he says to you, in that low familiar voice, "what is it that you want to do?"

And you say: "Just an interview, Brian, just an interview."

But he seems to hear you say: "I'd like to saw off your leg without the use of an anaesthetic, Brian."

And there is a heavy silence on the phoneline. And all you can hear is the sound of him breathing. His inner mind whispering: "I could do without this. Really, I could do without this."

And you are just about to apologise for ever having bothered him when finally he sighs and reluctantly apportions a slice of his time to this, the least palatable part of being manager of the Derry football team. Media interviews.

See you Sunday then, Brian."

"Yeah."

You put the phone down. People ask you what did he say, what did he say. You tell them that his enthusiasm was infectious. Then you brace yourself.

Sunday. He stands in Celtic Park, Derry, with his back to the wind and his face ruddied from an afternoon of exposure to the elements. Brian Mullins. Pondering.

He seems exiled here, in the cold north. If you grew up in certain parts of Dublin, through the seventies and the eighties, Brian Mullins was one of the reassuring things in life. You'd see him surrounded by milling kids on the two soccer pitches on the way to Kilbarrack railway station, with a tracksuit on his back and a whistle in his mouth. You'd see him on Sundays, blond and indomitable, wearing the blue shirt of the county team. No one man encapsulated the spirit of that great team like Mullins. He was a distillation of all its elements. Strong and bright and passionate.

Later still, you'd see him heavy and hurt as he recovered from the car crash that almost killed him. You'd wonder if he would ever walk again, ever run again, ever play football again. Then he disappeared to New York and came back and did all those things wonderfully and dragged another Dublin team on his back to an All Ireland. Finally, he waned, but his presence about the place remained reassuring. Some day he would transfuse some part of himself into another generation and produce an All Ireland winning team.

Here he stands, then, somewhere in Derry, somewhere between the Brandywell and the Bogside, back to the wind. Transfusing. Exiled. Pondering.

"The media?" he says. "The media? That's a question for another day maybe."

His antipathy towards the gurriers of the Fourth Estate is the stuff of legend. He once returned a call to a journalist merely to inform him that he, Mullins, wouldn't speak to him.

Famously, on another occasion back in the eighties, he growled that he had "no comment to make" and that he wasn't "to be quoted on that".

The knot of suspicion runs deep, but is web founded. Few in Irish public life have suffered such unnecessary or vicious excoriations as Mullins endured from a certain source in the early eighties. "Perhaps you'd better ask certain colleagues of yours why newspaper the next day carried a picture of the great man departing the scene, two fingers raised in the air.

That's Mullins and the media. A connection never quite made. He grapples with it.

"I just don't ever want to talk about myself in any great detail," he says. "Other people in the GAA see that as part of their duty, maybe even a bonus. For me, I can't feel comfortable doing it. I don't see the necessity for talking in detail about myself. I manage a football team. How I do that should be evident from the results."

Results. Last autumn, when the Derry manager's position went abegging for the second time since the county won the All Ireland, just over two years ago, somebody about the place drew up some specifications for the job. The new manager would need to build "sufficient rapport with the players to enable him to announce the team line out for a Sunday". It was noted that "successful applicants (ie. those who win an All Ireland) will have their position reviewed immediately".

Brian Mull ins, a legend in residence not far across the Border in Carndonagh, was the perfect solution to a long festering problem. Derry was riven by feuds. Mullins was the ultimate deterrent.

Speak to Derry county board officials and they will breezily opine that the players are afraid of Mullins. Speak to players and they will offer it as an article of faith that the county board are terrified to cross Mullins' path. Speak to Mullins and he merely expresses the thought that he feels there is respect in all the relationships.

Speak to anybody who knows Mullins and they will wager that come the crunch, in this type of faction fight, Mullins will always be a players' man.

Examine the history. He has managed once before, one part of a cursed trinity. The year after his playing career ended, 1986, Mullins, Robbie Kelleher and Sean Doherty presided over a Dublin team which lost to Meath in a Leinster final. They disbanded soon after, packed in the experiment. Mullins, just past 30, still had much to offer.

In 1990, the Dublin management job was his again. Pat O'Neill, Jim Brogan and Fran Ryder were to be his selectors. All three were older than Mull ins, had seen him arrive on the scene as a boy wonder back in 1974. They had also seen him pull the team through games, drag the county along in hard times. The boy wonder had become the heart of their team. All were happy to serve under him. Come the crunch, however, the Dublin county board got windy. Cards were shuffled. Mullins never got to cut the deck. His carefully picked team of selectors found themselves working under Paddy Cullen.

The genial Cullen lasted just two years. The group which Mullins had brought together wrung an All Ireland out of their team last September. By then, however. Mullins had been five years in Carndonagh running the biggest secondary school in the country. He has closed the chapter on all that business at the turn of the decade saying only that he "wouldn't necessarily judge a county board in the light of experiences with another county board".

He leaves enough space between the lines to make it clear that this Derry team will be his fiefdom. Not the county board's plaything. That is the foundation of "respect in all relationships".

Today, his Derry team have just won their third successive competitive game under his tenure. They are accumulating respect as spring progresses. Wins over Clare, Lao is and Kildare won't have set the Mullins pulse galloping, but as he strides towards the dressing room, hatted and gloved, he seems content enough. He beats the cold out of his hands, banging them together without rhythm.

"The second half?" he laughs. "Sure, talk to the players about it."

Indeed. The second half of a good winter league game has seen Derry struggle to enhance the favourable impression made through a sprightly, first half exhibition. Perhaps, Mullins muses, the hard work being done towards the championship is counter productive to good league performances at this time of the year.

You have to ask though about the essential, jarring strangeness of seeing him here in this ground, below the graveyard and above the Foyle. This is the man who once ran right over Mickey Joe Forbes, the self advertised hardest "wee man in Ulster". As Mickey Joe was being carried off he was told that he had just encountered "the hardest wee man in Leinster".

Now, his passion burns in the cause of the OakLeaf county. For a man whose heart beat a little stronger when it had a crest of three castles close to it, the source of motivation has changed, surely.

"I can't put words on it," he says, staring away off into the muddled maze of the Bogside. "Plenty of county players, when they stop playing, they cut their ties. That is it for them. I never planned for a career managing teams. Being here is a coincidence almost. My job, certain events in Derry. I don't know yet what relevance it has to what you call my passion for the game.

I was involved as a youngster and involved all through my adult life. I had no aspirations about this job, but all through life you move on. When the job was there, I sat down and thought and found that my natural inclination was to be involved again."

DERRY'S good fortune. When he took over as Derry manager he gave the players a 10 week fitness programme to follow. Responsibility for reaching targets was down to individuals. A question of respect arose. Players ran up mountains and down dales, cajoled their way into rugby clubs, got together in groups and urged each other on. Anything to reach the targets. Maybe legs were a little heavy this afternoon. Maybe. Players have shown their respect through their response, though.

He is still feeling his way through this job, he says. Asked to define the origins of his management technique, he says that, as yet, "he doesn't have one. Just flying by the seat of my pants at the minute". Yet, instinctively, he seems to know the right buttons to push with players.

"When he dies his epitaph will be that `he didn't like wankers',"says one. "He's not a man for the sidestep.

"For the first time in a couple of years there is morale in the team again," says another. "He's a big step up for us, in terms of anything we have experienced."

His first game in charge of the team brought an annihilation at the hands of Kerry. Mullins, more mellow now than in days of yore, grinned afterwards at the irony of the green and gold jerseys arriving in Ballinascreen to spook him. He said little to the Derry players. "I told them that this was the state of Derry football. They didn't look like All Ireland champions any more. There wasn't much else to say. I didn't plan it, but in hindsight for a manager having a team humbled like that isn't a bad way to start."

He found a team and a county on its knees and knew that it wasn't the right posture for that team or that county. He says that accepting the job after 10 years away from inter county football was merely a matter of discussing it with people close to him. He sought no preconditions or guarantees. Force of personality brought the rest.

"He didn't seek anything in private," says one player, prominent in the messy year of bad politics that was Mickey Moran's tenure. "Openly and publicly, he asked us all. He made sure there were no more skeletons lurking in the cupboard. He got strong reassurances that there weren't."

Mullins says that he "holds a view on `94 and `95 and what happened in Derry". More. "The general perception as promoted in the media wasn't indicative of the specific experiences of those internally involved. This wasn't a situation where you could walk in and take things for granted. It had to be made clear that past circumstances weren't part of the equation.

"There is a residual feeling that the 1993 team had more to offer. Events overtook them. I had to make sure that aspirations were still there. Things life motivation and momentum and commitment and spirit can't be taken for granted from match to match or from season to season. I tell them that every day is another opportunity to prove their worth."

His talks to the team, about football and the way to play it, have been a revelation to some players. These players have All Ireland medals in their pocket, but they have never heard these things before: football talked: about as an elemental force, as theatre, as an escape from the shackling ironies and conceits of life, as a pasture where passion and heart and brains rule.

You wonder will he ever go back, transfuse this wisdom and this passion into the body of a Dublin team. He says he is just living day by day, just working as hard as he can but, but, but . . .

"You can't be as attached to all the facets of Dublin life as I was and not miss it all sometimes. There are a lot of attachments. Sometimes we might wish that we could be 27 for ever, that things would never move on. Not many things are constant."

Mullins still burns for football. Constant. He has played for five years now in the 13 aside version of the game that is the Inishowen league. "It means a lot to keep active, to keep playing. It means a lot to play with my sons. I played with one of them last year. That means a lot."

"Much potential?," you ask of his sons. And he backs away from the possible advertisement of his own sentimentality. Uncomfortable with too much detail.

"Ah, sure listen," he says "what's potential. Two arms and two legs? Sure potential is only as great as actual application."

He is facing the dressing rooms. He begins striding in that direction. Huge strides. Darkness is falling. You follow him.

You know that he is done with the media for today. You know, too, that he'll never be done with football, that it he gives Derry everything he has to offer that you may be following him around Croke Park in September.