"When you get to the square in Cross', just ask anyone and they'll show you where it is." Sure enough, come Thursday morning, the first person you ask points you past the Northern Bank on the left and down the hill and round the corner to where he's standing talking into a phone in one hand and waving you into his office with the other. This is Joe Kernan's town; other folk just live in it.

This Thursday morning finds him weirdly in wonder at how busy the week of a championship game can be. He seems genuinely to have forgotten that at times it's a battle to see just how far down your to-do list you can get before you're in danger of overlooking the fact that there's a game of football to be played at the end of it all. Last night, he announced the team for the Monaghan game and had to inform, among others, his goalkeeper Paul Hearty that he'd be in the dug-out. It took the spring he had right out of his step.

"It's terrible. Still. The one part of the whole thing that kills me is having to go and tell a man he isn't playing on Sunday. I still can't get used to it. I know they're all working as hard as I'm asking them to and then I have to pull them aside and tell them I'm picking someone else. Like, Paul's a lovely, big lump of a lad and I know that he'd have gone home last night in terrible form. I ruined his week and his family's week. Take that out of the game and I would last as long as Sean Boylan."

When Boylan finally punched his card over the winter, it left Kernan . . . who is going into his fifth year in charge of Armagh . . . as the longest-serving manager in football. It's impossible to see anyone clocking up that kind of time span again, of course, not that Kernan would have the remotest interest in even trying.

"I'll know shortly when my time is up. I'll know when I can't give any more to this. And I'll have to know that before other people do, before the players know. It's the only way.

And it might be coming shortly. I definitely can't see me staying for too much longer. If I stay for another one or two years maximum, that'll be it.

"It'll be time for something new then. That doesn't mean that I'll walk away from the game itself. I'll still be around to help, doing something else. But management is as hard as playing and there's only so long you can go on for before you want your life back."

He picks an example from a week a month or two back. Saturday, he went to an under21 match. Sunday, Armagh had a league game.

Monday, he had a meeting of the finance committee. Tuesday, training. Wednesday, gym work with a few of the injured players and a function in Castleblaney that he thought was going to be a small affair until he turned up to find 300 people there waiting for him. Thursday, more training. Friday, another function, this one in Forkhill just out the road.

Saturday, another under-21 game.

Sunday, another league game. And on it goes. No wonder another two years are as many as he's prepared to allow himself.

"I probably would have walked away if we'd won the second All Ireland in 2003. But I felt then and I feel now that there's unfinished business. I suppose, to be honest, these boys need another All Ireland before they hang up their boots, some of them. It would have been wrong of me to walk away after 2003 or since and upset the apple cart. The way I've looked at it is that if I was to walk away now, a whole new regime could come in, the whole thing could be changed around and the county team could be bucked for another two or three years. And there are a few boys there who don't have another three years in them."

Kernan's careful to follow up when he alludes to the age of some of his lieutenants. He bristles at the idea that he's over a team of geriatrics. That there are miles on the clock is beyond argument. That the engine's clapped out, however, is a slur he'll refute all day.

"People talk about us being an old team but the amount of new players in here over the past couple of seasons is phenomenal. There's a picture up on the wall there of a squad of mine from a few years back and there are 15 players in it that aren't with us any more. So that's 15 new players on the panel, young players. Just because Kieran McGeeney and Paul McGrane are still there, people think we're an old team or that we're a slow team.

But take them out and the average age is fairly low. And anyway, I can guarantee you that the last players to be struggling at the end of the game on Sunday will be Paul and Kieran."

That said, when, as he saw it, the situation called for it in the closing stages against Tyrone last year, he had no trouble taking McGeeney off. There is little doubt that Tyrone were boosted by the sight of McGeeney heading to the sideline and although few have said it, it sits with some as the one major tactical error of Kernan's time in charge. It isn't a surface thing but its periscope has been sticking out of the water since it happened. But he's having none of it.

"Some people said a few things but the majority of the people didn't. When you look at the situation, we made a decision that we thought was the best one for the team. We were a point up and after we took Kieran off, we actually went two points up. Kieran hadn't been in the game for 15 minutes and we just felt the change had to be made. A fortnight earlier, Kieran had made the catch that won the game in the very last minute. Different days bring different challenges and different games.

"On that day, we felt we needed more help around the middle of the field. Naturally, reporters saw one of the best players ever to put on a pair of football boots being taken off with the game on the line and there was an angle there and I don't blame them for it. But we never took any real flak from people in Armagh over it."

He's still constantly amazed at the lengths McGeeney goes to better himself and his team. The decision to pass the captaincy to the side's other spiritual leader, Paul McGrane, was one Kernan says had very little to do with him.

"I wouldn't have taken it off him, wouldn't have dreamed of it. It was Kieran's idea. He came to me and said he was stepping down as captain. Him and McGrane are very great buddies and they've gone up to lift the Ulster cup together a couple of times anyway.

McGeeney will always be remembered as the man who first lifted the Sam Maguire for Armagh and I think he'd like for McGrane to be the second. We'd all like it. But that's a long way away yet."

It's three years since Monaghan last mugged them in Clones, a day they turned up as All Ireland champions and went home cowed and cranky with themselves. Games come and games go but of all the days that have shaped the Armagh we see turning up year after year, Kernan reckons that was one of the more crucial ones.

"That day, Monaghan showed us what hunger really is. Over that winter after we won the All Ireland, I went around a few managers of teams that had won it before and asked about the following year. And I'll never forget Eamonn Coleman saying to me, 'You won't know whether they're up for it until them players are atin' grass on their knees in Clones and they say to themselves that maybe it isn't our day.' And it's true. You can do all the talking, show them all the videos, use all the psychology you like but until they've been slapped to the ground and got a mouthful of grass three or four times, you don't know whether or not they're going to decide to be up for it.

"Of course people are hard to please but they're no harder to please than ourselves.

Another Ulster title this year would make it six in eight years for us and that hasn't been done since Down did it in the '50s and '60s.

It would be an unbelievable achievement.

But if you were to offer it to me now, I wouldn't take it from you. It's just not good enough.

There's one prize we're interested in and that's the All Ireland. It's all we're here for."

As if we needed telling.