As large as life, three times as natural, looking barely older than he looked a decade ago when he was abolishing famines, causing mayhem and generally being Ger Loughnane. Yesterday's man. Maybe yet next Saturday's man.

As ever, some of the most interesting items materialise in the interstices, in the asides while lunch is being ordered and eaten. (He had the chicken and ham and approved. ) The house he and Mary are renovating up the road in Sixmilebridge. How he hasn't missed a single training session with Galway and as a consequence has had to forego his usual July holiday in France. His enduring love of beagling. That young lad from Castletowngeoghegan who shone at Feile na nGael. The way his slot with the Sunday Game eventually became a grind. How his dream job would be that of director of hurling in Clare, with special responsibility for selecting and coaching the coaches; one third of the young lads he sees playing or pucking around these days are holding the hurley wrong, he estimates. He shakes his head at the heresy and sheer inefficiency of it.

A question as to whether he's enjoying life with Galway seems an obvious starting point. Immediately he's off and running, announcing that he's deriving more pleasure than he did during his first season with Clare, that Louis Mulqueen and Colum Flynn are two good men to help shorten a journey (two hours when they're training in Pearse Stadium, an hour and a quarter to Athenry) and that the Galway fellas in the backroom team are great characters. They'd want to be, it seems. Local Galway rivalries, dontcha know.

"Some of the things that have happened up there have left us incredulous. Two clubs not getting on, for instance, because some match would be coming up. I said to someone one day, are there any two people in Galway who don't hate each other? The county of the tribes, eh. . ? ! The club scene in Galway is dominated by two things. Rivalry and negativity."

Having observed the symptoms, Loughnane reckons he can diagnose the illness: communal frustration at the county's inability to produce a side to match the heroes of the 1980s.

"They were one of the three greatest teams of my time, along with the Kilkenny of the 1970s and Kilkenny this decade. Galway people then were reared on these big powerful men.

Finnerty, Coleman, Keady, McInerney. They get very frustrated when the players of today don't match up. And they feel they left two All Irelands behind them this decade, although how they feel that way about 2005 I don't know . . . Cork won it as they liked.

Ask most people their opinion on a player and if he's not from their own club, it's usually negative. Ask them to pick a team to win Galway the All Ireland and no two of them would have more than 10 of the same players. Yet they feel every year they should be winning the All Ireland." Another shake of the head.

He couldn't, he's quick to add, wish for a more dedicated group of players.

They're anxious to learn, anxious to achieve. Where they don't come up to scratch, he told the hurling board one night, is in the two areas Loughnane views as prerequisites for success in the modern game: winning aerial possession and coping with high-intensity hurling. "Without those two things, how can you win an All Ireland?" It is more than a rhetorical question.

Indications of the hidden shallows in Galway's lavishly-stocked playing pool of cliche came dropping with alarming regularity during the spring. Other than the win against Tipperary in Salthill, there wasn't a match in which they didn't struggle, the real wakeup call arriving not in the Dublin defeat but in the quarter-final against Wexford at Nowlan Park. "People said we didn't make an effort. Rubbish. There was no effort not to win it or to bail out of the league at that stage. But it was a complete eye-opener how easily Wexford opened us up. We failed to put up any decent score. Looking back at the league, it was totally unexpected to me how poor we were."

A question from one of our Galway readers. Given the county's plethora of confidence players, why didn't Loughnane and his selectors decide on their best XV from day one, nurture them along and attempt to mould them into a unit long before the championship?

The fact is, he responds, this is exactly what they tried to do. Exhibit A: the series of full-back auditions handed to Shane Kavanagh and Derek Hardiman, only for Galway to end up with Ger Mahon ("I don't think he's even 21 yet") in the position. Ask Loughnane if he has confidence in his charges and he cites the players' meeting that took place on the Tuesday after the All Ireland qualifier defeat in Ennis, the leadership shown by captain David Collins and the "whole new mood" that evolved from it. "The secret of management is getting the players to take responsibility. People expected me to go up to Galway with a magic wand and next thing an All Ireland would be won. But to win anything you have to start at the very bottom. Only then will you see who'll stay lying on the ground and who'll scramble to get back up again."

He has no shortage of confidence in his own ability, of course, even if he's happy to delegate the bulk of the work to Mulqueen and Sean Treacy and observe from upstairs. At this hour of his life, he doesn't have the energy for a hands-on role. "I could never give as much of myself physically as I did with Clare. I couldn't. It was actually dangerous."

The other changes he's noticed?

More journalists he's never heard of from papers he barely knew existed ringing him. More refinement on the tactical end of things. (Credit here to Cork for their running game. "I love innovation.") No marked increase in the pace of the hurling itself, but the body shape of players has altered out of all recognition, he's found. "Guys like Alan Kerins, David Collins, Damien Joyce, they're so serious in the way they mind themselves. I'm sure they train every day during the winter, whereas with Clare the lads . . . bar Jamesie . . . would always take time off and only train when training was on.

But that's the way it's gone in every county, and as a result players expect to be on the team. The number of players content now to be on the panel having put in the work they have has lessened.

"It's difficult to keep them all satisfied."

Loughnane and Kilkenny. Loughnane and Brian Cody. He tells two stories, the first of them a familiar tale from the challenge match that marked the opening of the new field in Gowran on the eve of the 2000 championship, a Sunday evening he believes to have been the pivot on which Cody's managerial career turned. The first half was harmless in the extreme. "Kilkenny disappeared into the dressing room and returned like a pack of savaging wolves. They tore us to pieces. I met Cody afterwards and told him that nothing was going to stop Kilkenny winning the All Ireland that year."

The second anecdote dates to Galway's NHL trip to Nowlan Park in April. With Sean Treacy entrusted with the half-time speaking honours, Loughnane took it upon himself to "take a ramble" around the bowels of the old stand. The sounds he heard issuing from the fire-breathing dragon in the Kilkenny dressing room he "couldn't believe", he claims. Hmm.

Lash ahead there anyway, Ger.

The eyes are wide open. He's all amused incredulity and faux-outraged horror. "I mean, if it was at half-time in an All Ireland final you could understand it, but this was a league match.

The absolute desire that Cody has to put Galway totally and utterly down shocked me. And worried me when I thought of what might happen to us if the teams met later in the year. Maybe he saw Galway as an up-and-coming team who had to be put down as soon as possible. I don't know. But if we're not aware of that before the quarterfinal, it's going to be too late."

Or maybe it's just that Cody, being Cody, is like that at half-time in every matchf "Yeah, maybe. It's that allconsuming, devouring attitude, along with their skill, that has made them so successful under him."

Brian Cody's biggest achievement in the eyes of his college contemporary?

"Undoubtedly the Mick O'Dwyer thing. Keeping the players motivated despite their success. Like Liverpool in their heyday. Win it, then onto the next achievement. His hunger has never abated." As another aside, Loughnane would pay good money to watch Clare 1997 versus Kilkenny 2007. "God, yes. That would be some contest. A pity it could only happen on computer."

Apropos of the midweek fuss over Kilkenny's 'savagery', he insists it stemmed from a misinterpretation of comments he made after the Antrim game. The same for his interview prior to Galway's visit to Ennis; his horticulturist's analysis of the fungi-like qualities of the Clare county board delegates was, apparently, simply a rehash of an article he'd written in the Clare Yearbook in 1992. "When it came out originally it was hugely controversial, but I wasn't known outside the county then. This time it was a small part of a much larger interview."

Talking of Ennis, why leave it 'til the pre-match huddle to tell the players the team? "We didn't. Everyone who was playing knew they were playing. They had known since that afternoon. The idea was to keep everyone else on their toes. It's very important . . . because hurling is a 20-man game . . .

to stop players from switching off completely. There's an awful lot to be said for the soccer system of naming the team an hour before the game. It keeps players tuned in." A long-standing hobbyhorse of his, this.

To the bigger picture. Loughnane freely acknowledged as far back as the build-up to the 1997 All Ireland final that hurling's former landlords would rule again, and sooner rather than later. What has surprised him is not the return of the kings but the vengeful and absolute authority that's accompanied it. "Next year it'll be 10 years since anyone outside the Big Three won the All Ireland. Who outside of them has any prospects of becoming a force in the next 10? Is hurling going to stagnate? People are longing to see Kilkenny and Cork out of the championship. They're banking on Waterford, or somebody else, to end their dominance. The way things are going, they'll even settle for Tipperaryf" Galway may or may not constitute his final job in hurling. Were he to retire from teaching, the challenge of managing an intercounty team would be a perfectly satisfactory substitute, he believes. 'Challenge' being the operative word, for he's never dined out on the two All Irelands with Clare, never allowed them to dominate his life. The thrill there was the journey rather than the destination, not to mention the concomitant process of changing a county's mindset "from one where defeat was bound to be their lot to one where victory was their right". In point of fact, he's never watched the video of the 1997 final, and the only reason he's seen the 1995 rebroadcast was because TG4 have shown it so often that curiosity got the better of him one night and he surrendered. Unsurprisingly, he was disappointed with Clare's hurling. "The effort was massive. The quality wasn't. But that was only the early days with that team. Baby steps."

He has his vision for Galway as he had for Clare. A construction project, a bricks-and-mortar effort that will take two or three years, at the end of which he'd hand over a team "with the physique and desire and skill to match the best that's around". (The physique up front potentially provided by Iarla Tannian, "who could develop into a great player", and Joe Canning "if he shows the dedication". ) If that team subsequently won an All Ireland for another manager, Loughnane would take as much pleasure from it as if they did it on his watch. "Putting in the foundations for the future in Galway is very, very important." For all that the sense of vocation that energised him in Clare was absent initially in Galway, success with his adopted county would give him as much satisfaction as success with his native county did.

"If I were in the stand watching Clare win an All Ireland, that's when I'd get a real thrill out of it. When you're down on the sideline, it's a different story. People don't understand that.

You just want to win, whoever you're managing. It doesn't matter what the colour of the jersey is. With Galway, the sense of vocation has grown week after week. You come to appreciate the players, the backroom team. And your professional pride and competitive instincts come out and you want to win."

Let us not get ahead of ourselves. As long as Galway give "a real fighting performance" next Saturday, part of Ger Loughnane won't be worried about what ensues. As long as they hurl with spirit, his intellect will be satisfied that a number of the correct boxes were ticked. But in the event that they crash and burn . . . well, in that case he won't shy away from looking in the mirror, he promises. "If Galway don't battle it out, then definitely the management of the team would be for somebody else.

That's what I'd be saying if I were in the commentary box. I have to apply the same standards to myself."

That he's burned bridges aplenty close to home in recent years doesn't bother him . . . appears not to have occurred to him, indeed. He never read his newspaper column or watched himself on the Sunday Game. Do the gig, move on. What other people made of what he said is not a subject that inclines him to speculation. "If people think I'm an enemy, I can't change that. I don't regard myself as anybody's enemy." Donie Nealon and Frank Murphy were two of Clare's "biggest adversaries" in 1998, he adds, yet he worked with both of them on committees afterwards in animosity-free circumstances, "and I'd appreciate the sincerity of the two of them and the huge contribution they've made to the GAA".

What'll your headstone say?

"Depends on who carves it."

Here lies that bollix Ger Loughnane, perhaps? "Ha ha! Ha ha!"

He reflects. "I hope the foxes are plentiful in the next world and that I have six good beagles when we move onto the great hunting ground in the sky."

And off he goes, back to Mary Loughnane and the renovations and the beagles. Yesterday's man. Maybe yet tomorrow's man.

emcevoy@tribune. ie