He knows teams target you like Gwent Dragons did last week. He knows his job is to handle all the little intricacies in the complicated world of lineouts and scrums. "People see Paul O'Connell on TV stealing a lineout and Paul does have a natural instinct for it.

But they don't see the thought process and the lifters getting in position and the work that may have gone into winning your own ball even from all the eight in there. There's a lot of time spent in the videoroom, analysing and planning."

It's not that he doesn't value the stats that file endlessly into the hands of the Munster staff after every game.

It's just, well, you need to trust your own instinct and look at the videos to get the full picture. Part of the job is separating the relevant from the misleading, what may actually be of use to improve from the more trivial or explainable bits. Take missed tackles as an example. Pure stats won't tell the whole story. He explains: "It's grand getting a figure of two missed tackles for one guy. But he might have run 50 yards in the last minute of a game to make that tackle. Compare that with the player who makes the decision not to run that 50 yards - he won't have any missed tackle statistic. Or there's no point in saying you won 95% of lineouts if most of them are from sloppy tapbacks. You need to take more into consideration that just blind faith on pure game stats."

They did a hell of a lot of work analysing Perpignan's set-pieces for the last round and he knows it's vital but he can't help preferring when things were a little simpler. Or when they're on the training ground. He's thinking of the Tuesday session before the Perpignan game "We had a full-on game cos the Llanelli game had been cancelled. It was supposed to start at 60%, go to 80% and then 100%. It started at about 90% and finished at 120%, very intense. Perfect preparation though."

There have been changes this year of course. One of the first things Declan Kidney did when appointed coach was meet with players and staff for a little voxpop (as Hickey calls it). The assistant couldn't fail to be impressed with the head's attention to detail. Hickey describes Alan Gaffney as "more at home in the tracksuit than the admin side of things" which lumped a lot of organisational duties on him. Kidney though is meticulous. One thing he's sorted has been the issue of travel between the Cork and Limerick centres, and there are much fewer overnights expected from guys now.

Happy campers all with that. He reckons they've flung the ball around a fair bit this year and don't quite deserve to be beaten over the head with this label of strong-pack/weak-backs. He'll point to the Castres and Sale games especially and the 22 tries they got in the group, more than previous years. "I think when Barry (Murphy) was at 13 we tended to move the ball a bit more freely cos he's just that type of player."

Next Sunday, work will see him up in the stands at Lansdowne with Kidney and George Murray (video analyst) nearby if needed. People always ask him for confirmation that the roar that greeted the team was the biggest ever or that the noise from the crowd was the most atmospheric ever but he can't honestly say. He's last to leave the dressing-room so has never been walking onto the pitch with the players.

And once the game starts, it's focus time.

"If I'm sitting back savouring the atmosphere I'm hardly doing my job now. I do remember the Wasps game a few years back when we scored a try and we were trying to get a message to Shaun Payne. But it was a full minute before I could be heard by the guys at pitchside on the headsets, before the noise died down." Only when the glitz interferes with the practicalities is it noticed. Hickey does recall sitting in the stand after the Sale game and Kidney not wanting to leave, entranced with soaking it up.

But is it time to lay old ghosts, spirits and all that to rest? Are the days of fantastically inspiring-yet-demoralising defeats coming to an end? Some say they need to. Some say, you know, maybe it's not the be-all-and-end-all.

Brian Hickey's one of those. "I think there's a Munster concept that needs to survive first of all. When we lost to Wasps in that semi-final a lot of people pointed at (Lawrence) Dallaglio and the way he carried on and said we needed to be more cynical to win the competition. But I don't think it's in our interests. You get the feeling that supporters think certain values have eroded with professionalism, but they can identify with the sheer honesty and obvious character in Munster."

But is it enough? Do people want success or to be thrilled? Can Munster keep expecting to be swept along by an inexplicable force? "I think it was Gaillimh (Mick Galwey) a few years ago called it the X-factor. I'm here a few years now and I can't define it and I reckon the time you start being able to define it is when it'll end. All I know is they've been questioned and doubted so many times but have always responded. This year we were facing into the three games with Edinburgh, Castres and Sale and came up with it.

You tend to stop being surprised."

So, like Maximus very nearly said in the film Gladiator, ?there once was a dream that was Munster.' That dream will go on until this quest is finally won, and probably much longer. "Ah, sure I'd talk forever about this gang if I was let, " Hickey says as he gets up. He ain't kidding and he ain't the only one.