CORK-YOUGHAL It began where many wonderful ideas begin and most of them end.

In the pub.

Rewind to the night of last year's All Ireland quarter-final. For the second year in a row, Wexford had been beaten out the gate by Clare.

"Meyler, " his drinking buddies told him, "you'd better go back home and sort it out."

His initial reaction was to laugh. Him? Sort it out? Having been out of Wexford for over 30 years? Sure nobody there would know him from Adam. Meyler dismissed the notion and half-watched The Sunday Game, feeling a slight sting of irritation when Ger Loughnane declared that Wexford didn't belong in the top flight but thinking little more about it.

That might have been that if the subject hadn't cropped up again the following night. You were joking, weren't you, he asked Sean Cullinane and Pat Quigley and Liam Weir, almost half-looking for reassurance. No, it transpired, they weren't. Why shouldn't he go back and manage Wexford? "After all, " they told him, "you've done as much as you're going to do down here."

Meyler couldn't contradict that last bit. In 14 years with Cork IT he'd brought them from obscurity to Fitzgibbon Cup finals and turned the college into a grooming ground for the Cork under-21 team. He'd helped his adopted county win an All Ireland minor title. He'd spent five years with Kerry, leading them to a championship victory against Waterford at Walsh Park and into Division 1. More recently he'd taken Ballinhassig from intermediate to senior and kept them there, giving them a day out in an All Ireland intermediate final in Croke Park en route. What else, he asked himself, did he want to do?

The more he thought about it, the more he realised the three lads were right. Time to go home.

The next step was to sit down and, like the lecturer in business strategy he is, cast a cold eye on Wexford hurling as a commercial entity. Where the business was at, where the business could realistically be brought in the space of three to five years, how best to make the journey. Why the business was where it was didn't take any searing insight on his part.

"Winning the All Ireland in 1996 was a great foundation that wasn't built on. A minor or under-21 All Ireland should have come out of it. They say down here [Cork] that if you win two All Irelands every decade you're keeping it ticking over. If Wexford could manage one All Ireland per decade, keep performing and win an underage All Ireland every so often, that would keep the show on the road.

"When you have that success, you really need to drive it home twice as hard. That's what Cork and Kilkenny do. When they win an All Ireland, they drive on and try to win it again. The strong tend to look forward. The weak look back and glorify their rare triumphs."

With the assistance of the other three, Quigley being a fellow Wexfordman lecturing at CIT, Meyler took six weeks to develop and refine his business plan. Only then did he write a courteous letter to the Wexford county board who, he suspects, took to him "as someone from outside but also inside". On 17 November, John Meyler was named Wexford manager. The game was afoot once more.

YOUGHAL-DUNGARVAN Hetells a story from the first week or two. A gym session had been organised for the panel, only for him to discover at 7pm that the gym was unsuitable. He rang Nick Byrne, one of his selectors, who just happened to be driving in the opposite direction. Byrne turned the car around and by 8pm had another gym organised for a session that began at 8.30pm. An object lesson in the realities of modern-day management.

"People have criticised me in the past for not listening. Now I have to. You have to trust people religiously. Trust the people with you and delegate to them." His backroom team comprises seven "proactive" individuals ("business theory is that that's as many as you can manage - keep it tight"). He couldn't be happier with the seven of them.

He could scarcely be happier with his players either. Especially the four survivors from the 1996 panel. Rory McCarthy, Damien Fitzhenry, Declan Ruth, Mitch Jordan. Fitzy with his strength of purpose and leadership and inspirational goalkeeping. Skippy Ruth's confidence. Mitch's quiet, dignified steadiness. Rory Mac, "an unbelievable character".

"I'd love to have had the four of them when they were 20. They got good basics in '96.

You always know the guys who get the basics.

You can tell the trainer by the players. Liam Griffin's character, his discipline. It shines out in the four lads."

The Meyler stamp is, he reckons, not dissimilar. One hundred per cent commitment.

Belief in your own and the team's ability.

Sheer determination to win, no matter what's put in front of you. No obstacle too big or too small. "There's always a solution, there's always progress. There's no negativity. Never negativity."

DUNGARVAN-WATERFORD The season to date in a paragraph. Defeat at home to Waterford on the opening day of the league. An encouraging win against Clare in Ennis. A narrow defeat, equally encouraging in its own way, away to Cork. Qualification for the National League quarter-final and a fine win over Galway. A trimming from Kilkenny in the semi-final. An injury-time win over Dublin in the Leinster semi-final. More ups than downs, and today Wexford are where they'd always planned to be. For the moment, that'll suffice.

Reaching the closing stages of the league constituted part of the objective too. "People said Galway weren't trying. I don't believe that. If those shots Fitzy saved had gone in, Galway would have won and people would have been saying they were back. And then we were accused of not trying to win against Kilkenny, which was also rubbish. Okay, we'd trained hard before it, but we went out to win."

The only thing that upset him - no, not upset him; worried him - along the way was the mini-tsunami of domestic goodwill engendered by the Galway result. For days afterwards he found himself taking jubilant phone calls from supporters convinced Wexford were going to win the All Ireland. Nearly three months later, he's still shaking his head.

The naivety of it, the optimism, the presumption. Thirty-four years away hadn't prepared him for the discovery that with Wexford fans, there's no middle ground.

"In Cork, no matter how bad they are, it's always, 'Sure we'll be there in September.' In Wexford, they're either useless or they're going to win three in a row. That's just incredible. It's been one of the hardest things for me to understand. There's no happy medium. It defies logic. I'm still trying to get my head around it."

Against Dublin he was delighted with the team's movement and their workrate, disappointed by the "under-12 defending at times" in the full-back line and concerned by the 17 wides. "A few suicidal wides. Loother wides, as Pat Shortt would call them." Reflecting on the goal chances that Mitch Jordan and Rory Jacob failed to put away in the closing quarter, he muses that it might have been for the best. "Had we won by 12 points you'd have had fellas beating their chests in the discos inside in Wexford. I'd told them beforehand that a point would do. Even if I didn't mean it like that?" In terms of commitment and attitude, he can't ask his players for more. Now, however, they've reached the point where they need "to step up and learn to take their scores. There's no point in saying we're useless. But as the league semi-final showed, we've a good way to go to get there, to get to the consistency of Cork and Kilkenny. The consistency of Cork and Kilkenny over the last 100 years, not just the last 10 years."

Every journey starts with a business plan.

WATERFORD-NEW ROSS He was a Cork selector in 2002, the Year of the Strike. Being Meyler, being a man who nominates Michael O'Leary as one of the business figures he most admires ("I like the way Ryanair do things - the efficiency, the effectiveness, the getting the best out of resources"), he stuck it out till the bitter end, the last of the selectors to resign. Any regrets, John?

He looks momentarily affronted. "Why would I have? I felt I was honest. I felt what I did was right. I'll go to my grave thinking that." What rankles with him now is not the fact that the players took to the picket line or the manner in which the situation spun out of the management's control: it's the memory of the National League final in which Kilkenny did them by a point on the finishing line. "I see it as a lost league, a lost All Ireland. I see it as being part of a set-up that lost a league final and potentially lost an All Ireland. Because Kilkenny, remember, went on to win two All Irelands on the back of it."

As a management team, their job was to win matches and titles. They didn't. End of. This is the scar that Meyler continues to carry from 2002.

NEW ROSS-WEXFORD Talk of the recent past gives way to memories of the distant past. Heading off after second Mass in Tacumshane to Croke Park in his father's Consul 375. His mother Josephine, who'd worked as manageress in Murphy Flood's Hotel in Enniscorthy, talking about the mighty men of 1955-56: Jim English, Tim Flood, Padge Kehoe, the Rackards. Ned Wheeler, another colossus, calling in his lorry selling paraffin oil to Meylers' pub, staying for corned beef sandwiches and mugs of tea and pucking around with the young John in the garden afterwards.

Although his parents have passed away, he knows both of them would be thrilled at the thought of his return. "It's a duty. It's an obligation. It goes back to that night in the pub after the All Ireland quarter-final last year. Time to go home."

That sounds corny, he reflects. A bit too American. He tries again. "It's about 100 per cent passion, 100 per cent commitment. It's not about the money. There's no money. People think you're on a hundred grand a year.

Ha!"

Ask not what your county can do for you, in the words of another exiled son of Wexford?

That's probably more like it, he nods. "JFK would have summed it up better than I did. I wouldn't have put it as nicely as that."

So what would represent reasonable progress in Year One? "Ah Jesus, that's unfair!

Look, life in 2007 is about winning. It's instant analysis today. You know how you're going to be measured. I'm not going to try and cod anyone and say I'm delighted to be in the Leinster final. If I'm only happy to be there, I might as well not be. On the other hand, we have to compete on the field. If we do that, that's good. But progress is only measured by All Irelands. Why should it be any different in Wexford?" He pauses.

"And when I was in Kerry I'd probably have said that too."

Today he'll leave home at 7.30am and drive to Wexford to meet the team at the Ferrycarrig Hotel for the bus to Dublin. What time he'll hit his bed at, he has no idea. "It's a long day, but that's what it's about. It's about Croke Park, about Semple Stadium, about Wexford Park. That's what we're there for. Months of work disappearing into 70 minutes when the teams cross the white line. Like the gladiators entering the coliseum. Game on."

Game on. John Meyler has paid his way to it.