At least not in the way they'd dreamt. There was a couple of thousand at that first league game, but by the last one the crowd was back to a couple of hundred. It's the numbers at training that alarm and depress Clare football men though.

For the past month, numbers have been fluctuating, from 14 to 18. Last Tuesday, five days before facing Waterford in Dungarvan, it was back over the 20 mark but even that evening their manager arrived in Cusack Park to find the hurlers training while his own players were training two miles away in Clareabbey.

Two weeks ago, Ger Quinlan, last year's captain, had enough. Ever since he joined the county panel more than nine years ago, Quinlan has been considered one of the county's most dedicated players, the kind who, if you called for 20 sessions in a month, would be at all 20. Two weeks ago he quit, his spirit broken.

In five months under O Se, the players barely touched a ball in training, except for games of backs and forwards.

Barry Keating, current selector and one of the heroes of the famous win over Cork 10 years ago, had introduced a few ball drills in recent weeks and they'd been well received, but the trimmings from Mayo and Cork only proved they'd been brought in months too late. When fellow senior players called up to Quinlan's house to coax him back Quinlan told them there was more chance of Seamus Clancy playing for Clare again.

The prospect of Clancy togging out again for the county 15 years after his famed All Star might seem laughable, but the way things are in Clare it's only slightly implausible. This past fortnight O Se's selectors have been scrambling around for players like some bad junior club team on a Sunday morning.

In Clare football circles, both the joke and word is that if you're a member of that '97 side that shocked Cork, switch off your phone. Peter Cosgrove hadn't, and 10 days ago, at 33 years of age, was asked if he'd be interested in playing his first championship match in nine years.

Cosgrove declined but some of the twenty-somethings who answered the call haven't even played championship for their club. It's that farcical.

Paidi was always a gamble, and Walsh's vision of All Ireland finals in the near future, always pure fantasy.

But throughout the 1990s, Clare had consistently been one of the top 12 teams in the country. After the humiliating defeat to Kerry in 2000, they had regressed to being a third division team, flirting with division four, but there had been enough performances under John Kennedy and last year's tandem of Michael Brennan and Donie Buckley to suggest, under a more inspired set-up, the county could re-establish itself as a solid, top-16 team. The question last winter was, with Brennan gone, who could help Buckley provide that set-up?

The sensible, long-term decision would have been to do what they did in 1990 and seek another John Maughan before he became John Maughan, a hungry manager with a point to prove; for one, Gerry Fahy, who won a Sigerson with NUI Galway and was unfairly discarded by Offaly after a year, would have fitted the profile.

The other option was to risk and think big. Westmeath had three years earlier . . . and O Se had rewarded them with a Leinster title. As one Clare football man puts it, "It's fine to say we needed a Luke Dempsey before a Paidi O Se but fellas like David Russell and Enda Coughlan who were going to pack inter-county football up wouldn't have come back for a Luke Dempsey. We needed a Paidi O Se . . . with the right attitude."

O Se with the right attitude and a point to prove has been one of the most formidable coaches in football. People forget that when he took over Kerry, the county were struggling to win Munsters, let alone All Irelands, but within a few years of his reign, Kerry's dominance over Cork had been resumed and assumed. He would guide the county to two All Ireland titles, yet probably his two finest years in coaching was when he didn't win an All Ireland but when, in 2002, he dusted himself off after his brother's death to lead his team to an All Ireland final playing probably the best football anyone of us have had the privilege of seeing in 20 years, and in 2004, with Westmeath.

That's why, on the last Friday of last November, a delegation from the Clare county board visited O Se's pub in Ventry where they told him they wouldn't take no for an answer. The first they'd heard he'd said yes was on the RTE news that Sunday. That breaking news put a lot of people in a jam:

the county board, who'd yet to tell Buckley anything about approaching O Se;

Buckley, who learned of O Se's appointment through a phonecall from his wife while he was in America that week;

and the newspaper, the Star on Sunday, that Paidi had been writing a column for.

The paper terminated their arrangement with O Se for not giving them the story, yet by the following Sunday, after making some calls, O Se was writing for another paper.

By then he'd also staged a press conference in the Temple Gate Hotel. At the same conference O Se was asked who his selectors were. O Se said he wouldn't be able to reveal that for another few weeks. Yet the following Sunday, the names were there, in his new column.

The following Saturday week, O Se was to present honours of achievement to Clare underage players at a function in the Armada Hotel in Spanish Point, with the presentation moved forward to half-seven, before dinner, to facilitate O Se. He didn't arrive for another three hours, apologising for his tardiness and state by claiming, "I don't know how you bury your dead in Clare but this is how we do it in Kerry!"

The board and players though were still willing to believe in the Paidi factor, and for a while, it worked.

Eager to impress their new boss, they won their opening two league games. But then they started meeting better opposition and started resenting that he wasn't staying around for the end of some training sessions. One night he called a player over to commend him on his effort for the previous few months and the player pointed out it was only his second night on the panel; he had him confused with someone else.

The players are voting with their feet. Dessie Molohan cited injury as his reason for leaving yet the management have seen in the local press that he's scoring freely for Moher Celtic in the local soccer league. At least there he can get to kick a bit of ball.

Now today, they'll either struggle to beat . . . or become . . . one of the worst two teams in Ireland.

? ? ? Wicklow no longer have that tag. The Micko factor has worked. Today they dream of winning their first ever game in Croke Park and the county board has sold more than seven thousand tickets to people wanting to see it. There were nearly 200 people at his first training session . . . well, 121 . . . togged out, wanting to impress. Only 30 of them remain but Thomas Walsh is on board.

The O hAnnaidhs are back.

The buzz is back.

As known and as fond as O'Dwyer is of laps, the drills conducted by Kevin O'Brien have featured plenty of ball.

With ball, comes fun; to put the time young men give to this, he says, then it must be fun. In 10 seasons now working with O'Dwyer, Gerry McDermott has never once heard him use it to his players. Yeah, at times he struggles with their names, but he'll have fun with them too;

his new forward Dean Odlum is jokingly, and now endearingly, known as "the flour man".

He doesn't just preach the value of "total commitment";

he practises it. And yet, he reminds them, commitment is never an imposition, it's a choice. It's a principle he uses everywhere. A few weeks before the 1998 Leinster final, a prominent Kildare player asked him if he could skip over to America for a few days to see his girlfriend. O'Dwyer said he could, that he respected a man who felt that way about a woman, just there would be no place on the panel for him when he returned. That player won his Leinster medal.

O'Dwyer, with his suspicion of some more modern, cutting-edge techniques, might no longer be able to take a team from level four to the highest floor of level five, but such is his grasp of those other more fundamental and yet overlooked sources of confidence, there's no one better at bringing a team to another level. The secret is to get people thinking positively, especially about themselves. To do great things, you must first feel great. When he tells them "They're flying it, man! Flying it!" they feel he means it.

A coach once said, "Players don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." Throughout their respective careers, O'Dwyer and O Se have repeatedly shown how much they know about football. The difference this year is only one of them has convinced his players that he cares.