"Apologies, " he says, trying to apply the breaks a little to his day. "I'll put that on silent now."

That's no problem. How are things?

"Hard going." Why is that?

"The new business. We've been open a while but only aimed to start trading properly around now. Things are going well and I suppose I can't complain. But I can't say it's not been hard going either with everything that's going on."

At least it's a more profitable stress than a year ago. This time 12 months ago many were disillusioned before he had even got near a championship game. His side had been pitiful through much of the league. On the last day they needed a draw against Laois just to survive in Division One. A year on, and they again need a draw against the same opposition . . . this time to qualify for the semi-finals. "We haven't been an attractive team in the league this season. But that's what's made the difference. It is winning ugly. In the past we've lost ugly and we probably should have been beaten by a number of teams this time around. But we've taken teams down to the wire, forced them to kick wides, harassed them and put them under serious pressure. And that's left us in a great position. Win against Laois and we're in a semi-final.

"Not that it was ever the goal. Up to the last day out against Westmeath we were trying to make sure we got in the top four. We didn't think of being in this position. Nor did we at the start of the year because we were struggling and we didn't expect this level of a turnaround. What's changed is the strength of panel, age-profile of panel, maturity of panel. That said, I'd expect us to be in a league semi-final having got this far.

It's a home league match and we'd like to win it. We've won all our home games and that is something you couldn't say about Kildare last year."

Thing was, they couldn't win away either, least of all in the championship.

It was in that cauldron where Crofton was boiled alive. He still says there was too much attention paid to the blood sub row with Offaly last year, that it took the emphasis off how poor Kildare really were. And then there was the Derry exit in the qualifiers.

That, he maintains, was down to him.

"We chose on that occasion to fly out of Dublin with the best interest of the players at heart. We had chartered a plane and very late there was a change in availability. So instead of having a tight time-frame between landing and game, we had a scenario of taking another slot a couple of hours prior to the original or cancel the whole thing and go by coach. We flew, had an early start, were hanging around in very humid conditions. It had the opposite effect to what we were trying to do.

A lot of emotional energy was spent hanging around the hotel. I could see there was going to be problems as the day progressed. We should have just taken a coach and got a good night's sleep. It was a disappointing championship."

Excuses. He's been around too long for excuses.

John Crofton rhymes off a galaxy. His close friend Larry Tompkins who might have been there. Shea Fahy and the often forgotten David Campion who ended up elsewhere when both were the county's best two midfielders in the 1980s. ("All in all, too much of a haemorrhage for a county like Kildare to operate on.") Drinking with Mick Lyons and Joe Kernan in New York.

Coming up against Matt Connor, the greatest player he ever saw. Being sent off in 1983 for swinging at Kieran Duff as Barney Rock hung from his legs.

But the closest he came was an All Star trip to the States in '85. Even then, he went as a replacement.

"My father was a sub on the Kildare team of 1935 that was beaten by Cavan in the All Ireland final, he was only 19 years of age. At 19 he got closer to it than I ever did as a player. It's 1976 when I played senior football for Kildare first. I can't believe that now. From 1976 to 1994. I played in three separate decades and won sweet FA. I didn't really come close if I'm truthful about it."

It wasn't his fault either. He won't admit it, but the problems often lay around him in both attitude and ability. One of the times he was a winner was the 1976 O'Byrne Cup final in Wexford.

Such was the novelty, the team were late returning to the minibus. Such was the novelty, the minibus was forced to pull over outside Tullow. "We all needed a leak. And it must have been harvest season because we all ended up chasing each other around a field at three in the morning. They couldn't get us back in the bus." Attitude.

"At that time we won Leinster minor and under-21 titles in consecutive years.

We were beaten by Kerry in 1976 in the All Ireland under-21 final and that Kerry team was already populated with fellas who had senior medals. The Meath team we beat in the minor final the previous year, Colm O'Rourke scored three goals that day.

They were a very talented bunch. But I remember the preparation of those teams, there was an assumption in Kildare. We thought we were so good we'd win the next year's Leinster. Little did we know that Johnny Mooney and the Connors were coming down the road.

We thought we had talent. They had a bank of it. Offaly produced so much in one year in a small county. Charlie Conroy, all these guys. So, as we should have been reaching our peak, we were going down. I played in the 1978 Leinster final, I went the whole of the '80s and played again in the '90s in finals."

The county's lowest points came in the late part of that dark decade.

Crofton was a defender but could kick the ball straight so was put in at centrehalf forward. He tried desperately to get Tompkins to return even though they would have been vying for the same position and there was only one winner in that pairing. "I found it very frustrating and was very conscious of it at the time. They were all different cases with guys who left Kildare but I always asked if it was Dublin or Kerry would these guys be playing for other counties. I remember having the conversation with people about how this was happening. I know before Larry went to Cork, Laois were knocking. And we were doing little to get back a player that was ours. But then along came Micko and gave guys like me and Paddy O'Donoghue an Indian summer really.

"It was crazy for fellas like us who had been playing for 12 and 13 years going for trial games. There was no favouritism though. That was the beauty of O'Dwyer's regime. But there were crazy things like the fact, in O'Dwyer's third year, I was a player and selector which was a farce. I was playing well to be on the team but that should have been it."

He has no excuses about 1998, the greatest disappointment of them all. He was still a selector that day as Kildare were beaten by a better team. But he could see it coming too. When Ja Fallon defied geometry with a point off his left foot from the left-hand touchline as Glenn Ryan looked to have herded him to safety; when Sean O'Domhnaill kicked a point high into the heavens and God himself directed in onto the roof of the net. He could see a demise coming too. "We didn't kick on. We were on an upward graph and we had to keep going. We had never reached that level.

We should have had that next winter thought out really well but there seemed to be more planning going into a trip to South Africa in January. That became the focus instead of training.

We found ourselves falling down the ladder instead of making it to the top. I'm not washing myself of it, I was party to it, but we failed miserably the next year.

"And I don't want that to happen to this bunch I'm over at the minute. I do think Kildare can compete for the big prizes. It's a question of generating that dynamic and keeping it going. I'm not sure if I'll see it with the other job and I'm not making an issue of it but it's the second year of a two-year contract and we haven't discussed anything else yet. But someone should be around to see this team do something."

Why not you? You know they say you are meticulous?

"I've heard that alright but I don't know what the future holds. I just know there's been a lot of years in my footballing past."

Anything you've learned on that long, hard road?

He laughs. "In Kildare? Patience, of course."