"There he is, full of life, enthusiasm, passion. If you had told me then he'd be gone three years later I wouldn't have believed it. I still can't believe it. I was speaking to him three weeks ago and he was saying that he had a sore throat but that he was on his last bout of treatment and reckoned he'd be home in 13 days." If anything that day, Coleman seemed more interested in how preparations were going for McElkennon with Monaghan ahead of the Down game. The previous week he'd asked were they planning to go away for the weekend and McElkennon had said they weren't. "Youse boys have to go away, " Coleman implored. "You need to build this one up. Your summer is half-over if you don't."

Monaghan ended up going away that weekend.

That same weekend, Eamonn Coleman slipped into a coma. McElkennon had wondered why there hadn't been any returned calls or queries of how the camp was going but on the Monday morning, Coleman's partner, Colette, rang to explain why. That Wednesday McElkennon was in the hospital when the priest administered the last rites.

He bade his own goodbye that night too, "goodbye for a few days, forever, I didn't know, but I thanked him there, out loud, for everything he'd done for me."

It was the final farewell. The following Monday he was three-quarters way back up to Belfast when Colette rang to say Eamonn had passed away.

They were an unlikely surrogate father and son pairing, the roguish, fifty-something brickie from Derry and the cool, thirty-something PE teacher from Tyrone, but from the moment they teamed up with McElkennon's home club Kildress in 1994, they clicked.

In McElkennon Coleman saw the best young coach in Ireland. In Coleman, McElkennon saw the best motivator.

Pat Spillane sometimes tells of the day Mick O'Dwyer's false teeth came out in the dressing room and not one Kerry player blinking an eyelid, so compelling was O'Dwyer's spell and message, but Coleman and McElkennon have a yarn that trumps that.

It was a league game in Sligo, back when the pair of them were over Derry, and McElkennon and his wife had decided to make a weekend of it. Saturday night had been fun but the first half against Sligo had not, and at half-time Coleman was fuming. Nobody was sacred . . . "Sean Marty, you're at nawthin'!" . . . and nothing was either, including McElkennon's . . . and as it turned out, his wife's . . . sportsbag resting on the bench.

"Next thing, " recalls McElkennon, "Eamonn's knocked it to the ground and there's mascara and fake tan and women's clothing on the floor, and I'm standing by the door, going, 'This is the most horrible moment of my life.'

I'm just keeping my head down, not making eye contact with anybody, thinking, 'Where do I go from here? The boys are probably all going, "What's the story with this boy Marty? Have we a transvestite in our midst here?"' "Next thing I look up and there's now a black piece of underwear wrapped around Eamonn's ankle. So I take two or three steps across the room. He takes a step, and I take a step, to try to get this off his foot. Nobody says a thing, just Eamonn, about what we're going to do to Sligo in that second half. Then everyone's out the door, and I scurry around and lift as much off the floor as I can as quick as I can and sit down and say to myself, 'I'm finished. Nobody's going to let me into a changing room again.'

"We ended up hammering Sligo that day. When the boys came in, I must have waited for 10 minutes for someone to hit me with the lady gear. But the thing is, no one said a word, and to this day I don't think anybody noticed what was taking place except me.

Eamonn Coleman could command a dressing room that much." Just how direct yet affable his old friend could be never ceased to impress or amuse McElkennon. Last year the pair of them were at the All Ireland final when they went to get some tea at half-time.

"There was a queue about 20 deep, " recounts McElkennon, "when near the front, a big woman turns round and recognises Eamonn and says, 'Oh, God, there's that wee man from Derry, Coleman.' Before you know it, we've jumped the queue to about three from the front and Eamonn has everyone eating out of his hand.

"Then the woman orders a big jumbo sausage roll, and her daughter, who's about the same size as her, she's having the same. Now, she's after inviting Eamonn to the front, letting him skip 10 minutes in the queue, yet Eamonn says to her [McElkennon clicks into an immaculate Coleman impersonation, with that suitable heavy drawl], 'I don't think you should be eating that.' "She puts her arm around him. 'Oh, Eamonn, ' she says, 'I need you training me!' "Says Coleman, 'You need more than that!'" And again the big woman laughed her big laugh. How could she not but laugh or like that wee man from Derry?

You couldn't get mad with him and he couldn't stay mad with you. McElkennon remembers the winter after they'd won the 2000 National League, Coleman had made it clear he wasn't interested in retaining it, so the players availed of such latitude by spending the night before a game against Clare drinking Ennis dry.

After the inevitable defeat, Coleman's competitive instinct was railing.

"He comes in, " recalls McElkennon, "and says, 'Youse boys make me sick!'

Now, it was one of those days you just wish was over. It was raining sleet outside and we were facing a six-hour journey back to Derry, yet Eamonn says, 'I'm not sharing the same bus as youse! I'm thumbin'!' So he lifts his clothes and out the door he goes. Everybody's sitting there, nobody changes.

Later we're on the bus and Eamonn's sitting at the front.

At the start it's dead quiet.

There's no videos, no cards.

Fifteen minutes later, who has the video on and who's at the back of the bus taking every penny off the boys?"

And now he's gone. It's surreal, thinking that he'll never again breeze into the house for breakfast, that he'll never again ask "How's that scrub [child] Joe?" It was McElkennon who asked his good friend from the Fermanagh days, Father Brian D'Arcy, to say the funeral mass, yet hours after that mass McElkennon found himself reading the Tyrone team picked to play Donegal and about to call Coleman to ask what he made of it when he realised that was a call Coleman couldn't take.

Yet Coleman lives on, even with this Monaghan gig. It was Coleman who recommended McElkennon to Seamus McEnaney and Coleman who recommended McEnaney to McElkennon. When McEnaney called over last winter to persuade McElkennon on board, Coleman happened to be in the house. "Eamonn went to move out of the room, " says McElkennon, "and I said, 'Eamonn, sit there.'" It took all Coleman and McEnaney's persuasive powers to sell McElkennon on the job. For the previous 10 years he'd be on the go non-stop. He was the trainer to Mickey Harte's Tyrone that reached the 1997 All Ireland minor final; with Coleman when Derry won the league and reached an All Ireland semi-final; with Dominic Corrigan when they took Fermanagh to an All Ireland quarter-final and league semi-final;

then with and without Coleman in Cavan. "I didn't know, " confesses McElkennon, "if I had the energy or desire to go again, and I couldn't afford another step back."

Cavan had been a step back.

For a while it didn't look it as he steered them to big wins over Meath and Donegal and into the last 12 after Coleman took sick, but from the start, 2006 was a write-off. "I was hoping after the year we'd had boys would want to push on, " says McElkennon, "but when some players come back the following season a stone and a half overweight, you have to question their ambition."

After the shock league defeat to Waterford everything wavered. On the eve of the first-round championship tie with Down, McElkennon dropped his out-of-form vicecaptain Finbarr Reilly from the first XV and Reilly didn't even turn up for the match.

"That, " sighs McElkennon, "was disappointing. Would I drop him again if I had to do it again? Without a doubt."

What he wouldn't have done again is go back for '06, at least not as manager. When Coleman had taken sick, he had no other choice but to step in and step up, but that had been a stop-gap measure. McElkennon had always been a number two. He had never wanted to be a number one.

"To be fair to the Cavan lads, I didn't get the best out of them last year. I was probably too close to too many of them.

For a year and a half I was their trainer and the next minute I'm their manager. In the last year I probably ended up being neither. Players didn't know where they stood.

When you're their coach, you can have the craic with them out on the pitch, you're the one they ring to say the girlfriend's called it off. Next thing you're the manager and you're dropping them and they're thinking, 'Jesus, I've confided my life to you.'" This year it's the perfect set-up. He's the coach, the trainer; the man organising hotels. Picking and dropping players, he's happy to leave to McEnaney. He likes McEnaney . . . his honesty and passion remind him of Coleman . . .

and McEnaney likes him;

already he's on record as saying what Coleman and Corrigan before him said, that McElkennon is the best coach in Ireland. The training facilities in Annyalla are the best in Ulster and the players are everything he'd want them to be and everything McEnaney promised they'd be: "Honest, unassuming, level-headed, committed." About the only quibble he has is their fetish for Rockymovies on the bus.

Looking back, the league semi-final defeat to Meath in Croke Park was a good thing.

They'd already achieved their spring target, winning promotion by winning all seven games, but Meath reminded them that there was still work to do. So they knuckled down again and beat Down for the first time in 20 years.

Now the challenge is Derry. The Derry Coleman loved and the Derry McElkennon, in a way, loves too. His kids go to school in the county, sometimes wear Derry jerseys. Some Derry players he faces today were texting him good luck messages when he was on the bus to big games with Fermanagh and Cavan.

Some were at his wedding.

So was you know who. And in a way, he'll be there in Casement today too.