When he was 11? Goalkeeper on the South Tipperary under-14 team in the Peadar Cummins Cup. Too young to play out the field yet too good not to be on it in some capacity, for he is possessed of a quality that has struck the team management even if they can't quite put it into words.

A kind of coolness that isn't cockiness, a confidence that isn't brashness, a maturity uncommon in one so young. Afterwards the North Tipp selectors ask who the young goalie is. They've been struck by the indefinable too.

When he was 18? Nine minutes remain in the 2000 All Ireland quarter-final when Tipperary bring on their sub-goalie, a minor, out the field. Wearing the number 16, Eoin Kelly bends down, clutches a fistful of grass for luck, blesses himself and grins. He is four minutes on when he takes a pass from Eugene O'Neill under the Cusack Stand on the 21, dodges back outside Rory Gantley to increase his angle, glances up and swings the sliotar between the Galway uprights. Doing what he hasn't stopped doing since. The camera cuts to the injured John Leahy, looking on from the sideline. The torch has passed to a new generation.

When he was 19? A famous one, this. It is his first championship start, a Munster semifinal collision with Clare in a Pairc Ui Chaoimh snake-pit where the loser will die and stay dead. The crunch moment arrives in the 13th minute. Seanie McMahon has a swipe at him that draws gasps from the crowd. Half a second later, Ollie Baker ploughs into Kelly and upends him. Well warned by Nicky English not to get sucked in, the youngster hangs onto the sliotar, rights himself like a Subbuteo man, is back on his feet within a heartbeat and moves the ball on. Beat up but not softened up.

When he had just turned 24? He's playing for the white team in the Vodafone All Stars exhibition match in the suitably genteel surroundings of the Singapore Polo Club last January. It is his first match since he broke his right arm against Toomevara in the county championship the previous August. He hasn't so much as lifted a hurley in the meantime.

An early ball comes Kelly's way. He feints right, sways left, swivels and from 50 metres out deposits the sliotar over the bar at the city end of the Polo Club to polite applause from the attendance. A hundred deceased British Army colonels writhe in their graves.

Believe it or not, he is relieved. "I'd never been injured before, and this was a bad injury.

To score from the first chance on my return was a big thing psychologically. You know the way you're always doubting yourself in your headf" Eoin Kelly? Doubting himself? Nah.

He was a talking horse almost from the moment he was foaled. The year Mullinahone won their first and only county under12 A title, they racked up 4-24 in their last three games. All 4-24 was scored by E Kelly.

He once hit 18 points in a game when he was under-16. The year they drew with Killenaule in the South minor final, he hit 5-10 of their 5-11. That word of his feats spread and didn't need to grow in the telling was no mystery.

That he somehow avoided contracting a dose of RSI from the wear of knocking over point after point probably was.

Yet Owen Joseph Kelly . . . he decided he preferred Eoin when he was in first or second class . . . wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has lost far more finals than he's won. All Ireland minor and colleges finals in the same year.

County finals in under-14, under-16, minor, under-21 and senior in the space of six years. He lost a county senior final before he won one. He won his first Munster final but has lost the next two. Man does not live on talent alone.

The 1999 All Ireland minor decider was, he says, an afternoon that "passed me by". Not his fault; Galway's gameplan not only involved John Culkin, their full-back and captain, sticking as close to Kelly as possible but also entailed their midfielders and half-forwards working overtime to cut off the supply at source. Bingo on both counts. Paudie Butler's Tipp youngsters were reduced to chasing the game from early on.

They didn't catch up.

His two years in St Kieran's opened up his horizons, introduced him to players like Tommy Walsh and Brian Carroll and Tony Griffin and Tony Carmody. Kelly appeared in two All Ireland colleges finals, losing the first against St Flannan's. Rather than cast him in his usual role at right-half forward for the rematch in Nenagh the following season, Adrian Finan and Pat Murphy, the St Kieran's managers, decided in a eureka moment to site him at centre-forward. He had the physique, he had the strength of character, so why not try and get him as much involved as possible?

Finan had only one qualm: Kelly would be marked by John Culkin. "I talked to Eoin beforehand and asked him had he any inhibitions, " Finan recalls. "He looked at me as if I had two heads. No fears, no hang-ups." On one of those April afternoons where bloodymindedness counts for far more than brilliance, Kelly led the line splendidly, landed three points from play and was fouled for a string of self-converted frees. Kieran's won by 1-10 to 0-9.

The week after he finished his Leaving Cert, Nicky English called him in to train with the seniors. The nine minutes against Galway ("I wasn't as disappointed afterwards as I should have been, I was just delighted to come on and get a point") served as a preview of forthcoming attractions. Come 2001, Kelly was, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, a member of Tipperary's championship XV.

A little too much of a new boy for his own liking, mind. If he's to win another All Ireland medal, he'll do so as a man who's genuinely earned his stripes. "I'd like to be more part and parcel of an All Ireland win instead of just tagging along. That was the first year for myself, Lar Corbett, John O'Brien and Paul Curran.

The likes of Brian O'Meara and Tommy Dunne had been there for ages and knew the effort that went in to winning an All Ireland.

With the holiday afterwards and everything, we thought, wow, this is some life. You'd want to be more involved than we were."

Given his way, the 2003 National League final against Kilkenny is the match he'd like to play again. In hindsight, he reckons, that was the day it began to unravel for Tipp.

Himself, he wasn't getting the distance for a while there either. First-half aplomb was followed more than once by second-half anonymity. Kelly scorched Philip Larkin for three points early on in the 2002 All Ireland semi-final before losing his way and finishing with two wides. He did a similar job on James Ryall 12 months later before fluffing an easy free shortly after the resumption and becoming just another of the hands that went down with the ship. There might, he accepts, have been "a small bit of fitness" missing.

For the record, Kelly loves his food in "that rural, country way". In the rare event he doesn't clear his plate, Jimsy and Mary Kelly are quick to enquire what's wrong. But he knows his fighting weight, 13 stone, and he never puts on more than half a stone in winter. That photo of a not visibly underfed Kelly winning the Fitzgibbon Cup with Limerick IT last year? "A few lads said it to me alright, " he chortles. "The thing was, I had hard training done for that Fitzgibbon. If I was carrying a belly there'd have been something wrong. I think it was the camera anglef" Fair is fair, of course. To fixate on his rare off-days is more a compliment to him than otherwise. Like Nicky English and DJ Carey before him, Kelly set the bar unnaturally high unnaturally young. That's why we remember Ollie Canning for overwhelming him in Salthill in 2003: because it was Kelly.

That's why we forget his virtuoso display for 55 minutes of the 2002 Munster final, his two assists for Benny Dunne's goals unfairly if understandably overlooked in the general sharing of Waterford's joy: because it was Kelly and, yes, because it was Waterford. It is immensely refreshing to hear the more vocal element of the Tipp support sing their hosannas to an artistic corner-forward rather than to a corner-back. Amid the county's recent darkness, his light has been unquenchable.

By his scoring statistics shall ye know him.

Of the 29 attempts Eoin Kelly has made on the opposition goal in his two championship outings to date in 2006, he's put one wide, had one rebound into play off an upright and seen two saved. He's scored 2-23, 2-12 of it from play, the points divided equally between his right side and his left, most of the latter examples of his signature score: the point despatched when he turns infield from the right and strikes smoothly, almost lazily, off his left-hand side from any range up to 65 metres out. He attributes the gift to his years of playing on the right flank of the attack for various teams. His left side improved by osmosis.

If it is in the nature of genius to be imprecise, then Eoin Kelly is not even the second-cousin of a genius.

But cold statistics can never tell the full story. By what Kelly doesn't do shall ye know him as much as by what he does do.

He doesn't spoon his first touch to an opponent. He doesn't hit aimless wides. He doesn't get blocked down (and when he did by TJ Ryan in the Limerick game he still recycled the ball for a John Carroll point). He never gets hooked, courtesy of the tightness and efficiency of his swing. He doesn't depend on withering speed. He doesn't solo his way into trouble or get bottled up. He doesn't entangle himself in running battles. He doesn't attempt to do everything himself. He doesn't essay the impossible. Then again, decision-making comes more easily when one's silicon chip is housed at sub-zero temperatures and never gets switched to overload.

The source of Kelly's ability to deconstruct the complicated and make the difficult look simple over and over again? To Nicky English it's his "phenomenal first touch . . . and he's just coming into his prime now".

To Paudie Butler it's his "variety of stroke . . .

opponents think they have him and he comes out with another type of stroke". To Adrian Finan it was the intensity with which he applied himself in training. "I've seen much the same with Peter Barry. The best players train harder than anyone else." To Kelly himself it's merely a matter of learning as you go.

"When you start off you want to score with the first ball so that you're not looking over your shoulder to see if they're going to take you off.

But once you're there for a few years, it's different. You know you're there because you're a good forward and can score. You know that the selectors know you're good. So now you worry about work rate. You want that to be your number one priority." Hence the difference, if any, between the Kelly of 2003 and the Kelly of 2006.

Experience is another word for it. "Told to stay in the corner, you will, whereas when you're younger you'll be mad to run out and get the ball. Now you're patient. All any manager wants to see is work rate. Hooking and blocking. If your tongue is hanging out after 20 minutes, you're doing your job. Hiding: there's nothing as bad. We were told that the last couple of years too, but this year we seem to be doing it better. We're hurling with more freedom. Maybe it was the two early goals we conceded against Limerick. We had to hurl with abandon after that."

He's consciously going for goal more often.

Against Waterford he claims he was merely in the right place at the right time for the first goal ("Diarmuid Fitzgerald did all the work"), while for the second goal, time seemed to stand still.

"The whole thing opened up for me. I don't know if it was the World Cup or what that made me kick it." His Mullinahone upbringing, surelyf The one wide he has hit to date, with his back to the posts shortly before half-time against Limerick, disappointed him. Maybe he should have tried to find a better placed colleague instead. On the day the miss didn't matter, but it could have mattered on another day. Like today.

"Against Cork, those will be the kind of chances we have to take. We can't be going for Hail Mary scores. You won't get them against Cork, you won't get space against their backline. Last year we were probably happy to be in the Munster final. This year you'd just be hoping that everything goes your way. Frees, everything. Any chance of a point, it's taken."

Some Eoin Kelly bits and bobs as follows.

He listens to dance music in the car. He hasn't been to the cinema for years. He watched the horror movies Saw and Saw 2 on DVD last weekend. He's been going out with Sarah for yonks. (Tough, girls. ) He opened the new Tesco in Clonmel last Monday, although he agrees he's probably not as well known to the public as he might be due to the helmet. If he has a temper, it's only seen at home during occasional fraternal squabbles with Paul.

"I think you're allowed lose it with a brother, " he offers. Quite.

Best piece of advice he ever received?

"Someone once told me to try and be respected on and off the field. Hurling is grand. But you have to be able to walk down the street and have the oul' crack, the oul' chat." He pauses. "But I want to win more. As well as the respect, I'd love if people could say, 'There's Eoin Kelly, he has six All Irelands won with Tipperary and seven Munster medals. And an All Ireland club medal.'

"You have to have dreams, don't you?"