"He played his game and I played mine."

Sounds like our man alright. It's difficult to think of another defender from the 1990s, Brian Whelahan naturally excepted (Padraic Kelly's star waned almost as soon as it waxed), who would have been as happy had hurling been a non-contact sport.

With Corcoran as with Whelahan, the ball was what it was about, the man an afterthought.

Corcoran was blessed with fluency right and left, anticipation, aerial ability, sound decision-making and no obvious lack of speed. Yet over and above that, nothing about him ever seemed forced or strained. Seanie McMahon's status as the supreme centre-back of recent times is unquestioned at least partly because Corcoran didn't feature in the position for long enough with a team that was good enough. When the man who made his championship debut at right-corner back against Kerry in the 1992 provincial quarter-final finally got around to winning All Irelands, he won them for Cork rather than with Cork.

Mark Landers was the captain in 1999; Corcoran was the leader.

He departs this time the possessor of a medal haul infinitely more commensurate with his gifts and the bequeather of a raft of imperishable memories from his second coming. The point off his knees against Limerick at the Gaelic Grounds, the gamebreaking drop-shot goal against Waterford in last year's All Ireland quarterfinal, the late point against Kilkenny in the 2004 final, a score that brought a rare flash of emotional baroque from this most placid and selfcontained of individuals, the Ming the Merciless resemblance notwithstanding. Was it the Tribune's imagination, incidentally, or did the revenant Corcoran convert an inordinately high proportion of his pointscoring opportunities . . . and an inordinately high proportion of them from tight angles? It probably wasn't the Tribune's imagination.

He resembled, in the words of Winston Churchill on Kevin O'Higgins, a figure carved from the antique. Put Corcoran in a team photo from any decade and he'd have looked the part Eamon Dunphy once spoke of Pat Jennings as possessing "the dignity of an ancient king"; it is a remark that would as legitimately apply to Corcoran. In a society where a week spent in a reality TV house constitutes qualification for stardom and where heiresses who don't make even a pretence to talent can bring Grafton Street to a standstill, he is the kind of person every small boy should be forced by law to have as a childhood hero.

That he also leaves a book behind him is to be welcomed.

Where many contemporary GAA memoirs are singleissue ventures and not necessarily any the worse for it, Corcoran's autobiography Every Single Ball hums with breadth and depth. Engagingly written, occasionally touching, cleverly structured and lean without being terse, it also contains the best line you'll see in a sports book this year: "If I was charged with murder in the morning I'd go straight to Frank [Murphy] to defend me." Some readers may weary of the constant sports psychology speak, but that's more a function of modern intercounty reality. Still, roll on the day of an autobiography whose subject hasn't read a sports psychology book in his life.

Brian Corcoran lines out for Erin's Own today. Catch him while you can. It is a piece of advice aimed not at the Wolfe Tones players.

'Every Single Ball: The Brian Corcoran Story' is published by Mainstream, price /14.99