Eamonn Coleman started noticing the tiredness and the bone-deep cold when the first Cavan training runs of the season came around in late autumn 2004. The realisation that something was seriously up dawned when he was standing beside Martin McElkennon at a session the following March, his assistant in a t-shirt and him with not one but two coats zipped up to his neck. The diagnosis came three days before the drawn Dublin v Tyrone All Ireland quarter-final last August, "a great game" that took a hold of his mind and directed it away from anything to do with the word cancer. And the lowest point . . . a blood sugar surge that left him in a coma for a day . . . happened to fall on the evening before the epic Tyrone v Armagh semi-final. But not to worry. Someone made sure to tape it for him.

He's back to full health now.

Mischievous as ever, cranky as ever with it. We're not talking more than five minutes before he's launching into the Derry county board for getting rid of him after the 1993 All Ireland win. Football, he reckons, was never the same for him after that. "To be honest with you, " he says, "I don't think I ever really got over it.

There's a hurt there that never really went away." And he's off, lashing away at "them boys" who got rid of him when they hadn't earned the right to and pointing out that he came home from London to take over a team them boys couldn't get anyone else to look at.

But that's not why we're here, sitting in a pub just outside Dublin tracing a finger over the past 12 months. They initially thought it was pneumonia. He never found a lump of any sort and his worst symptom was a cough. But the cold went through him, froze him to his marrow. By Easter of last year, he needed Eamonn Coleman's attention much more than the Cavan footballers did.

"I wasn't fit to go on at all.

It wasn't that I decided to walk away, the cancer decided that for me. The cold was unreal. When I look back, I'd probably been feeling it for seven or eight months. I was always cold and always tired but I just thought it was the football and the cold winter."

He smiles now at the rumours that did the rounds at the time. There was an opening of a pitch and a match against Dublin that he couldn't go to because he'd lost a stone and a half in the space of a fortnight and couldn't move from his bed. But a couple of the players didn't turn up for it either and next thing you know, he and they had apparently spent the evening lowering pints in a country pub. "And I never took a drink in my life, " he laughs. There was even talk that the Cavan county board had made his illness up to cover for the fact that he'd resigned his post.

Not that he had the time, the will or the energy to give a thought to what some might say. He had enough real problems to be worrying about perceived ones.

"I was very ill all through the summer. It wasn't until August that I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, which is cancer of the lymph nodes.

Now, I never thought I was ever going to die apart from that first day when they told me what I had. When you hear the word cancer, you think all sorts. But then the head doctor came in and explained that I had one of the cancers that could be kicked out the door completely. Once I heard that, I was okay.

"But I was very ill. I was in hospital for about 15 days, then I was home for a week.

I was on steroids at the time and they were killing me with the thirst. I was drinking diluted orange because it was nice and sweet and I was sick just drinking water. But it put my blood sugar through the roof. I passed out with it on the Saturday evening and didn't come round until after the Tyrone-Armagh All Ireland semi-final the next day.

That had me in hospital another week. But after that I started to improve."

He went from 11st7lb to a lightest mark of 8st4lb over the course of his treatment.

He had to undergo 12 chemotherapy sessions which, he says, weren't as bad as he expected them to be. Not that they were fun or anything. "You get used to them, " he says simply.

Mostly, it was the weakness of his body that took getting used to. A brickie all his life, he was all of a sudden having to come to terms with having the lifting power of a teenage girl.

"I started walking in the hospital, got up out of bed and started walking the corridors just to get some strength back into me. I was so weak with the weight loss, I couldn't even sit on a wooden chair because the bones in my backside were cutting into me. Over three stone is a serious amount to have gone from you."

The chemo worked, though, and two days before Christmas last year, he got the all clear. It had passed . . .

the scare, the ordeal, the whole wretched year. Gone.

Best Christmas dinner he's ever eaten.

There are reminders, though. For one, there are the pictures. "It gets hard to look at yourself. I saw a photo the other day, a family one from Christmas. And now, I was feeling brilliant at Christmas because on the 23rd of December I got the test results from the doc, telling me they'd got the last of it out of me. So I was feeling fit as a fiddle. But I saw this photograph and, Jesus, it's hard to believe. My face is so thin in it."

More distressing is the fact that his partner, Collette, was diagnosed just over a month ago with the exact same disease after she found a lump in her neck. She's been through four chemo sessions and the outlook is good, but still. It never rains, eh?

"She knew exactly what it was because she went through every last step of it with me. She talked to all the doctors with me and saw what I went through. So when she got a lump on her neck and was diagnosed as having Hodgkin's, she wasn't too bad about it.

"She's a very strong character. The fact that I'd come through it helped her father more than it helped her, I think. Her mother only died of cancer there two years ago and he was very anxious not to see her go the same way. So for me to have come through it put his mind at rest a bit.

But I'll do the same for her as she done for me. I wouldn't be here only for her and my three sisters."

So life will keep him busy for the foreseeable. Even if it didn't, his football days are over and done with regardless. McElkennon says that if Coleman ever wants to come back, the Cavan job is his, no questions asked. There's still a depth of affection for him in the county panel, as shown by the two-minute standing ovation he got when he visited their dressing room after the recent league game against Sligo. "I hadn't seen the team in 12 months and I just dropped in to see them, say hello. It was a bit embarrassing. I'm not into those things."

But you wouldn't go back?

"Oh God no. Never again.

They warned me in the hospital never to manage a team again. They told me to do anything I liked as long as I enjoyed it but that the stress of managing a football team would be too much. Cavan are in capable hands with Martin and Damien [Cassidy] and I'm delighted for them to carry on. My days are done.

I'm a spectator now. It wouldn't matter who came along and asked me, I'll never manage another team . . . club, county or otherwise. I enjoyed my time but it's over now.

"I had my mind made up to give up football anyway so it wasn't really a big decision.

The cancer decided it for me but I was thinking about it anyway. It's a young man's game. I think you have to be between 35 and 45 to manage a county team. When you're that age, you're mad for it altogether. I remember being disappointed when a match was over on a Sunday because I'd have to wait until Tuesday night to get going again. But when you get beyond a certain age, you're moving away from the players. In the beginning, I used to sit down the back of the bus and play cards with them and have the craic with them. But the older you get, the less you can do that."

That Sligo game was the first one of any kind he'd been to in a year. So weak was his immune system throughout the illness that he couldn't go near crowds for fear of infection . . . indeed, during his recovery, if he was thinking of calling in on a friend, he'd ring ahead to make sure there was nobody in the house with so much as a sniffle. But the Sligo game broke him back in and he was at Meath v Derry the next day. Coming out of Pairc Tailteann, someone told him that Cavan had been beaten by Waterford.

"I thought they were messing with me. Cavan did well to get to the point where they were as good as qualified for the league semi-final but to lose to Waterford is unacceptable really. I'll be there on Sunday but I wouldn't be too confident for them. They're wrecked with injuries."

So go on, then? Who'll win Ulster?

"The championship will be tough won, like it always is. I think Ulster's between Tyrone and Monaghan because I think Monaghan will beat Armagh next Sunday. Monaghan are one of the few teams in Ulster that are quick and fast on the top of the ground. Armagh have probably too many of the boys the wrong side of 30."

And overall?

"Well, Kerry stand a chance if they don't meet Tyrone. They don't know how to beat Tyrone. Did you listen to a lot of what they were saying before the final last year about what they were doing in training? Playing 18 against 15 and all this bullshit? Great talk it was. But then they went out and played exactly the same as they had the last time. They withdrew the fullforward and left [Colm] Cooper and one other in there on their own and Tyrone dropped a man in there and he cleaned up everything.

"The only game I'd like to see Tyrone winning in is against Kerry. I don't like Kerry. They're so arrogant and they always have excuses. Even a great player like Mikey Sheehy had to make excuses for them the first year Tyrone beat them. They think they have a divine right to win an All Ireland just because they're Kerry. But if they had to play in Ulster they'd have nowhere near the amount of All Irelands. The poorest team in Ulster would beat every Munster county apart from Kerry and Cork."

And he's away again, thinking of counties he doesn't like (Tyrone) and counties that don't like him (eh, Tyrone) and talking about players he's had through his hands down the years. "Don't let Brolly fool youse boys, " he says as we get up to go. "I don't think he knows as much about football as he likes to think he does."

You'd miss the old goat all the same, wouldn't you?

ULSTER CHAMPIONSHIP PRELIMINARY ROUND PREVIEW DOWN v CAVAN Casement Park, 3.30 Referee E Murtagh (Longford) Live, RTE Two, 3.00 Martin McElkennon wasn't just playing the poor mouth during the week when he spoke of needing an intervention from Lourdes and beyond to get a passable-looking team on the pitch in Belfast today. Without Nicholas Walsh, who's going to catch or even secure midfield ball? Without Michael Lyng . . . and with Ger Pierson back from a cruciate lay-off a little quicker than some in the county would have liked . . . who other than Larry Reilly is going to raise white flags? Without Jason O'Reilly . . . at least from the start . . . who's going to raise green ones?

Affairs are little more encouraging at the back. Pauric Reilly is a willing soldier and one every bit as capable as Darren Rabbitte (another cruciate victim) who would have been giving Benny Coulter an afternoon of it. But the need to have him there leaves the rest of the defence with an unbalanced look to it. In the light of captain Anthony Forde's suspension, Paul Brady's return at wing-back comes not a minute too soon.

So is there e'er a chance of an upset? Hard to see it. They'd need an unholy stinker of a performance from their opponents to see them on their way. With a full squad to pick from and a manager in Paddy O'Rourke who always looks just this far away from grabbing a jersey and tearing onto the pitch himself, Down have no excuses here today.

Coulter is the obvious danger but he has plenty of help. There's a fair chance that the fullforward line of him, Michael Walsh and Liam Doyle will score enough between them to win this game on their own. If they don't, the contribution of Dan Gordon (right) should swing it.

Cavan are not a poor side. A little more concentration in that wretched second half against Waterford a few weeks back and they'd have been on their way to a possible Division Two title. We might even be talking of them as dark horses by this stage.

But Rabbitte, Forde, Walsh, Lyng and O'Reilly are the equivalent of, say, McMenamin, Gormley, Cavanagh, Mulligan and O'Neill in Tyrone. No team in the land could be expected to overcome that kind of destruction. Down to take it by more than five.

CAVAN J Reilly; M Hannon, P Reilly, K Fannin; M Cahill, A Gaynor, P Brady; D McCabe, C Collins; M McKeever, P Reilly, S Brady; G Pierson, L Reilly, S Johnston

DOWN B McVeigh; M Cole, B Grant, D McCartan; P Murphy, J Clarke, D Rafferty; A Molloy, D Gordan; E McCartan, A Rogers, D Hughes; L Doyle, B Coulter, M Walsh Malachy Clerkin