Ireland's new manager, Brian Kerr, came out of leftfield - League of Ireland to be precise - to take Irish soccer's top job. Keith Duggan profiles the warm, loquacious Dubliner with a passion for the game.
The sceptics would have you believe that the Brian Kerr story reads like a Hollywood fable. The loveable rogue, always good for a wink and a happy word, reared on the dank and glamourless fields of League of Ireland soccer, making it all the way to the top. Catch Me If You Can.
Kerr broke all the rules. The only way he made it on to the Elysian fields of English soccer was through the turnstiles, same as any other punter. He was a Dub without pretensions, grand for the trough of Irish soccer but hardly top-table material.
And yet this weel he was beating off the terrace heroes like Aldridge, Dalglish and Moran with the one piece of silverware he ever won as a footballer, his famously lonesome Intermediate medal dating back to the 1982 season with Bluebell United. To outsiders, to those observing from a distance, it made no sense. Brian Kerr. Who is he, they wondered? Soon, they will find out.
On Wednesday, his arrival at the grand ballroom in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel was greeted like one last encore from Sinatra. Press men who have shivered their way through countless League of Ireland winters with Kerr whooped for joy. The boys of the FAI smiled wanly at the flashing cameras, shocked at being at the centre of a joyful occasion. Friends, Kerr's lifelong and many friends, turned up to see the show. And what a show! As promised, Brian Kerr talked for Ireland.
He told jokes which ranged from the bad to the criminally wrong. He winked and charmed crusty old hacks who believed they were immune to it. Everyone in the room was a fan and, had he taken the mike and started to croon, it would not have seemed inappropriate. The English press, accustomed to tense inquisitions on days like this, stood on and marvelled, quietly stunned. They were witnessing both the homecoming and outbound journey of a local hero.
Eamon Coghlan has a good word for Brian Kerr. Cagey. Always thinking, always alert.
Kathleen Coghlan and Margaret Kerr were friends on Cooley Road in the 1950s, and it was natural that their sons, born a few months apart in 1953, should pal around together. In those early years, their world did not extend past the patch of green on the Dromard Road. Soccer, cricket, Gaelic, scudding on the back of buses, chasing girls and climbing orchard trees is how Coghlan remembers their childhood.
The economic stagnation, the smoky stillness of inner city Dublin didn't really make an impact on them.
They were just kids. Coghlan played for Rialto under Fran Ray and knows that Brian Kerr did too, but can't remember where. What he recalls most is Kerr hammering front doors on Cooley Road to make sure they had a team for the local street leagues. Even as a teenager, behind the merry eyes, Coghlan saw in his friend an obsessive, a thinker, a deeply serious person.
Years later, when he was big news on the world athletics stage, he would receive invitations from Kerr to come and talk with the players at Home Farm. His neighbour was immersed in soccer at this stage, haunting juvenile soccer pitches in the battered anorak that would eventually lead to the nickname, The Greener. Mick Lawlor gave Kerr his managerial start with Home Farm.
Originally, Lawlor sought to hire Noel O'Reilly as an assistant at Home Farm but, though O'Reilly was desperately keen to take the post, he didn't want to compromise his work with the School for The Blind. Go for O'Reilly's friend Kerr, Liam Tuohy advised.
Within a year, Lawlor found himself content to stand back and let his young apprentice talk the talk in the dressingroom. He looked at how the players responded to him, felt the energy peak in all those stuffy, windowless rooms around the country, saw the way he made players glow and knew he was looking at a natural.
What has he got, Brian Kerr, besides warmth and hugs for everyone? Talk to any of the endless players who died for him on league Sundays and it all comes down to detail. Kerr planned for weekend games as if they were a military expedition. Nothing was left to chance. But he made it fun, made it seem as if the club was a family.
Pat Fenlon, who starred for St Patrick's Athletic during the Kerr era as manager (1986-96), and who now manages Shelbourne, reckons he rarely had to scream anybody out of it because a natural system was in place. Players kept each other in line. And if Kerr had to speak with someone, it was done privately and quietly, but you walked away knowing precisely who was in charge.
A few months ago, Fenlon was asked about his choice for the Irish job. From the top of his head, he plucked the name John Aldridge. And later he felt terrible about it because he honestly hadn't thought of Brian Kerr, hadn't really dreamt that one of his own would be entertained as a candidate. In the pantheon of Irish soccer, the stay-at-home boys, the League of Ireland lifers were, after all, seen as second-class citizens.
So Fenlon and hundreds like him find themselves grinning for no reason these days.
Greener! The Irish job! Even a year ago, it would have been unbelievable.
At last, the League of Ireland has respect. At last it has a voice that can be heard.
Fate has had a hand in this. Maybe if so many of the Irish youngsters that Kerr led to U-16 and U-18 European championships in 1998 had not become global stars, his name would not carry such weight. And if the McCarthy era hadn't imploded just so, maybe the FAI would have by-passed him and sought out another old boy from the Charlton era. One who has lived the glories of the English professional game.
For Kerr carries no such traditional pedigree, and that is why there have been murmurs of discontent from some of the Irish heroes of the last 15 years. Gently, they scoff at his achievements with schoolboys and dare him to succeed with the taut superstars of the volatile professional game.
And on Wednesday, he arrived promising to do just so. Because, aside from the japes and the grins, here was a man choked with the privilege of having the opportunity to manage his country. His natural confidence and human empathy carried him through and when he spoke about soccer, it was with the recognisable fluency and intelligence that has marked him apart. But you could see he felt knighted by this elevation to what he described as the best job in the world.
Mick McCarthy must have smiled at that one. Maybe the sceptics will be proved right. Maybe the local hero will be too innocent and raw for the big time. But those who know have watched his evolution and will bet their lives against it. Already he is showing the way. Irish soccer had forgotten how to laugh until this week. Brian Kerr sauntered into the job that some believe he was born to do and made everyone see they were all in it for the same reason, that it was all about the game.