The day before Cork met Meath in last month's All Ireland semi-final, Morgan didn't travel up on the train with the team. First, he had family to attend to. When Morgan resumed the position of Cork manager in 2004, everyone assumed he'd give Nemo a break. Instead he stepped down as club senior manager only to become the intermediate team's manager. That's what brought him to Blarney last month. Those intermediates had a county semi-final against Mallow and Morgan couldn't be anywhere else.

It was a tempestuous match, played in torrential rain. Two players were issued straight red cards. On the line, tensions were running high.

Ultimately, the game was decided by Mallow's Cian O'Riordan. O'Riordan had been on the Cork panel in 2005 before been released, and after kicking his fifth point from play in Blarney, couldn't resist roaring and shaking his fist in Morgan's direction. He was merely taking his cue from others. Throughout the game, Mallow mentors had taunted a seething Morgan, accusing him of being all washed up.

In Nemo they had seen it all before. A few years ago, the seniors lost some Kelleher Shield match in west Cork, and as Morgan patrolled the line, he was stalked himself by, as one clubman puts it, "some fella behind the wire who probably goes to six games a year".

The tirade was savage and relentless. "You f***n' bo***x, Morgan; you ruined Cork football! There was three more All Irelands in that team!"

Morgan bit his lip and took it. He regretted it. "We lost today, " he told his players afterwards, "and on the line I lost it too. I should have decked that bastard."

The players laughed, but they knew he wasn't joking.

But that day in west Cork he resisted, and he did the same again last month in Blarney.

The following day in Croke Park his other family would need him. Less than 24 hours later Billy Morgan coached his tenth All Ireland semi-final for Cork, masterminding the annihilation of the pre-match favourites.

Today, the county plays its tenth All Ireland football final of the past 50 years. Morgan has played or coached in nine of them.

He's not washed up. He hasn't ruined Cork football. Forty years on from his first All Ireland as a player, 20 years on from his first as a coach, he's still its saviour, its beacon, its Dali Lama.

Two words keep popping up in any discourse of William Morgan: passion and respect.

The latter doesn't just stem from his record or knowledge but his sheer physical presence. Two weeks ago, Mark O'Connor found himself at the back of the church with another former Cork teammate at Joe Kavanagh's wedding, observing Morgan walking down the aisle after receiving communion. Both came to the same conclusion, "Christ, he's still a fit fecker."

These days Morgan no longer joins in on games of backs and forwards , but he'll routinely fit in a five-mile jog between a night on the lash with the lads and catching eight o'clock Mass. Last autumn he ran the New York marathon. O'Dwyer and Justin are also remarkably fresh men for their age, but they weren't running marathons at 61. O'Dwyer and Heffernan may have been football's first modern managers, but Morgan was its first modern coach. A PE graduate from London's famed Strawberry Hill, he looked at sports science as something to be embraced, not scoffed at.

Before other GAA teams had even heard of the terms, Cork were using parachute training bags, video analysis and sport psychologists.

Initially the mental training had mixed success. A couple of years before he teamed up with his long-serving collaborator George Tracey, Morgan availed of the services of another who took positive thinking to an extreme. At half-time in the 1992 Munster semi-final, when Cork were trailing heavily to Kerry, the players trooped into the dressing room to the sound of Tina Turners's 'Simply The Best'.

You can picture what happened next. Suffice to say, the song, tape, ghetto-blaster and mind guru didn't last long in that particular dressing room.

But that was the thing about Morgan; while another coach would have abandoned that discipline, Morgan continued to believe in and benefit from its merits. As one former Cork players puts it, Morgan, contrary to popular stereotype, was never a "bite, boot and bollicks" kind of coach. Before a team went out onto the field, players were allowed, nay, encouraged, to sit quietly visualising how they wanted to perform instead of hopping off walls. Whenever Morgan would sense the group needed to be stoked up, one particular player who favoured the more chilled approach would be duly excused from the room.

But as much as he's advocated emotional control from his players, containing his own emotions has been the plague of his life. As one old teammate says, "I'd say Billy spends most his life regretting things.

It's as if he spends half his time falling out with people and the other half trying to make up with them."

One of the most fascinating passages of Brian Corcoran's autobiography is his recollection of a training ground incident in the mid1990s. Morgan had again joined in for a match when he was duly flattened by a shoulder from his marker, fringe player Gary McPolin. Seconds later Morgan was back up and McPolin the one on the ground.

Morgan knew he had crossed the line and when teams were been picked at training the next night, he quipped, "Well, Gary, I better go with you tonight!" And that was it. They never held that outburst against him; instead just shrugged their shoulders and said that's Billy. Corcoran raves about Morgan in his book; his tactical acumen, the confidence he instilled, the man's passion. "I've met some exceptional people in my life, " wrote Corcoran, "but of them all, Morgan is the most intense." For a man who'd be close to Donal Og Cusack . . .who reinvented hurling goalkeeping and its puckout a bit like a certain fellow Corkman reinvented football and its kickout 30 years earlier . . . that's some statement. If there was one other county that really stoked the fire within, it was Meath. On Easter Sunday of 1990, Cork lost an ill-tempered league semi-final to their nemesis that made their All Ireland triumph the previous year feel null and void; Cork might have had Sam, but Meath still had it over Cork.

Once Morgan got his players back in the dressing room, he ordered them to all kneel and pray that Meath made it all the way through to the following September so Cork could bury them once and for all.

Then when that team did emerge from that prayer room, they were greeted outside by a chorus of insults from a sizeable Meath following. Cork were nearly expecting it; during the game Larry Tompkins had been routinely booed before every free. Now as Tompkins walked out to the maddening crowd, flanked by Morgan and Counihan, the three of them resolved that the best thing to do was keep the head down and keep walking. By the time they had negotiated their route, Counihan and Tompkins were looking around, wondering where Billy was, only to find him halfway over one of the railings, entangled with some of the Meath mob.

Often it's been his own that have most irked him. Before the 1977 Munster final a selector took the county board line of objecting to the infamous Three Stripe deal which Morgan had arranged and Morgan clocked him. Shortly before the team took to the championship field in Munster this year, he bluntly ordered the county secretary Frank Murphy out of the dressing room, and when county chairman Mick Dolan approached him the following Tuesday about the prospect of some kind of apology, Morgan promptly stormed out of training, leaving players unsure if he'd show up the following night.

Even his greatest servants have been at the receiving end of his outbursts. At half-time in one club championship game Niall Geary was admonished by his coach. Geary railed back and when he was told to sit down duly informed his manager that he wasn't "f**n' sitting down"; it took a selector to pull Morgan away.

"It could be a Thursday night before a game, " says one player, "and you're thinking this is only a kickabout, and he'll go and f**k someone out of it. It could be [Colin] Corkery, Steven [O'Brien], Martin [Cronin]; wouldn't matter.

There's always that edge there."

In Nemo though they're used to it. One of the first players he congratulated after that match and half-time stand-off was Geary. Then again, if he has a spat with some fella outside the club, he could just as easily blank him for life. That's Billy. In a way they fear him, but they love him and they respect him, utterly and totally. For one, there's his knowledge of the game. As a coach, he'd devise a series of conditioned games to meet the side's needs. Their trademark possession game was drilled into them by being restricted to one solo and one hop in games; if a guy was stuck after that, would you be there to support him?

Then there's his vision and belief for and in Nemo and Cork. Says one Nemo man, "Regardless of how Cork do against Kerry in this All Ireland, his greatest achievement was getting us to three All Irelands on the trot. I remember when we came in after losing the second one to Ballinderry.

Billy started talking and I was going, 'For God's sake, Billy give it a rest.' But he went on about how we were the greatest bunch he'd ever worked with, how you don't always get what you deserve when you want, but eventually you will and that we were going to win the following year's All Ireland. Even back in 2000 when we weren't contesting All Irelands or winning counties, we'd have some tournament game on Paddy's Day when Crossmaglen would be in Croke Park and he'd say, 'Lads, we should be there.

We're the best team in the country.' And he said it again that day in Thurles. Well by the time we'd showered, we were no longer thinking of the second final we'd lost. We were going to win the third one."

A keen reader, he was citing Vince Lombardi and Greek philosophers before it become fashionable in sporting circles. "Today is Monday, " says one Nemo player. "I have no doubt between now and next Sunday he'll cry before that team and some of the players will be shedding tears as well."

Yet he knows not to overwork it either and knows when to delegate. In his final few years with the Nemo seniors, pre-match speeches were handed over to his friend Jim Cremin to provide a new voice.

O'Connor still raves about the defensive coaching Frank Cogan provided in Morgan's first tenure with Cork. At the start of his second season in his second coming with the county, Morgan put up his hand in front of his players and told them that losing to Kerry and Fermanagh in '04 had taught him he was way off the pace of inter-county football and would be bringing in Lisa O'Regan and the UCD sports science team.

This year Cork beat Fermanagh by 13 points in the league. Today, they play Kerry in an All Ireland final. Against Louth the call was to win for Noel O'Leary. Against Meath it was to win it for James Masters. Today, he'll urge them to do it for Anthony Lynch.

But all along they've wanted to win for him. Their Billy.

Their Dali Lama.