Tall tale. A footballer busts both his knees by the time he is 21, does them so good that when he plays football afterwards he tries never to leave the ground. He's about 6ft 4in so that's not the handicap you might think it to be. Meanwhile, he watches his county win a hurling All-Ireland. Infatuating it is, too. That same summer he wins a junior hurling championship with his club. Small potatoes, good taste.

Life goes on. They win an intermediate and suddenly there's a whiff of big time. He's called onto the county hurling panel. Hurling is a different country. They do things differently there. His club wins football and hurling senior titles in the same year. You'd have to notice that there's four times as many people at the hurling final. Meanwhile, on the county panel a biblical plague of injuries forces him into the full back slot. He's apprehensive, but soon he is to full forwards what l'orange is to ducks, soon he's in Croke Park, where you'd have to notice the 50,000 people watching, soon people are talking All Star.

Meet Darragh Ryan.

On the roads through Wexford the late summer colours send you back to better times and sunnier days. The faded purple and gold fabrics flecking the towns and twisting down from the rear-view mirrors of the born again first saw keen daylight at least five years ago when Wexford hurling was living large.

From 1997 onwards chastening defeats had made blithe heathens of them all, however. They watched Offaly win an All-Ireland and worse, saw Kilkenny win two of them without fuss. It was easier to turn away, but now, freakishly, they are back at the big dance, miracles and backdoors have brought them back.

Darragh Ryan is a little different to the rest. He's a convert from another denomination, a refugee from one of Wexford's football cults, and one who doesn't consider himself a natural hurling full back.

Yet, redeemed, saved and born again he has brought his convert's zeal to the business of being sheriff of the square. In Wexford it has been a summer of redemption and Ryan is central to the mood. Playing on a team where the forwards have had a tendency not to take their guns to town he has stood up and let Wexford build the last line of their defence around him. As August slips by in a decent season for full backs Darragh Ryan is challenging strong for an All Star award.

Last Sunday he gained ground with a storming conclusion to the game which defined the late summer hurling revival. Not exactly pushed around by Declan Ryan before the break, he came into the dressing-room quietly happy only to have conceded a point to his man. He's sampled enough of the Tipp man's experience and strength to realise, too, that down the stretch a lot was going to hinge on him.

There was a passage towards the end of the game which best measures the burden which the Wexford Ryan carried. The sliotar dropped into a thicket at the back of which were the Tipp full forward and Wexford full back. Darragh Ryan took the weight of a challenge from Tommy Dunne, fastened the ball into his hand and went looking to take the steps he feels are his right. He braced himself for the imminent arrival of big Declan and duly the big bang moment came. Darragh Ryan scarcely moved from the blades of grass he'd planted himself on. Declan Ryan was swinging out of him like a kid playing with his Dad.

Strange thing is, Darragh Ryan isn't a full back by inclination. For St Anne's, drawn from the half parishes of Rathangan and Cleerstowne, he plays centre half and Davey O Connor, who plays corner back for the county, wears number three. O'Connor also wears the three for the vaunted under-21 side who lifted Wexford's summer. Ryan came to full-back play by accident and expects to vacate the spot in time.

"Donal Berry, another clubmate of mine, was the man for it after Ger Cushe retired but Donal got injured. Then Eugene Furlong might have come in but he got injured too. We were going to play Rod Guiney there in a league game against Cork this winter but Rod got injured too, so I went in there and we had a good game that day. I sort of knew I'd be there after that."

Wexford have left him to his own devices. Ger Cushe, a selector now, leaves him be, refuses to throw his years in Ryan's face any time a mistake is made. Ryan, equipped with sinewy, inconspicuous strength and simple principles (well principle: get the ball first) has fended for himself and done well.

His work on Declan Ryan was instrumental in chiselling a draw out of last Sunday. Having done so, Wexford claim the momentum for Saturday's game. About 4,000 Wexford people came to see the team play Limerick last month. Maybe five times that were in Croke Park last Sunday. It doesn't take much to kindle the interest in Wexford.

Darragh Ryan knows that now, even if until 1998 he thought of himself as a footballer toiling and sweating in this land of hurling. He played for the county and for St Anne's, who were striving year in, year out to regain the football title they had last held in 1968. Even in 1998 nobody in the club would have predicted that two weeks after they'd eventually annex the senior football championship they'd win the 2000 senior hurling championship as well.

It all happened organically. There were never any shrieking hurling purists in the club demanding that lads reject football and all its sins. They just got a group together who were good at both games and championships came unto them.

Nowadays their training evenings unfold like freeform jazz sessions.

Because the overlap on the senior hurling team and the senior football team is so huge the club has the same selectors for both panels and everyone arrives to the field for training ready to jam. They play some hurling, segue into 20 minutes football, then pull up the sticks and helmets again and get back to swinging. The amount of time they give to hurling is, they reckon, about twice what they give to football. You lose your touch quicker and somehow it seems like a bigger deal.

"I was a footballer most of my life," says Ryan. "We were playing senior football and junior hurling and in Wexford it's not much of a privilege to be playing junior hurling. But we won the junior in 1996, the intermediate in 1999 and even the guys on the team began to realise that the real hype and the passion in the county is for hurling. We won the hurling last year and we're there still this year. We concentrate more on the hurling, we have to just to survive there."

His ascent to the county senior team wasn't as much as a surprise as you'd think. He knew he was playing decently and knew what their needs were. He'd followed them from the stands in the summer of 1996 and stood with another 30,000 or so on the square in Wexford town when they cup had come home. Knocked a couple of good weeks out of it and saw them go well in 1997.

When he got called on in 1999 joining the hurlers was a corporal act of mercy if nothing else. He didn't realise that, though. "When I came on the first year we all knew that Offaly had won in 1998 and had been lucky to beat us. We thought we'd go somewhere but we got beaten badly. Then the same happened the next year, in 2000. That was the worst day. No backdoor or anything. Just dumped out of the championship after a lot of work."

This summer they refused to have their season defined by the Kilkenny defeat. "Losing this year wasn't as bad as last year. The first half was even enough, playing at full back I saw very little, and if I'm not seeing much we're winning possession somewhere. Then Kilkenny got that goal and left them six or seven points ahead.

"Not many teams can peg back six or seven points on Kilkenny. Then a goal and a sending off, we lost our shape. It was a disaster, but it was learning. It was a hard defeat. On Tuesday in training in Glynn Barntown, we said to ourselves 'here's this back door, we've usually ended up turning around and going home lets use the door this time. We have the chance to redeem ourselves, to give it 100 per cent against Limerick'.

"We knew it wasn't that major of a shock to the general supporter, and maybe not to ourselves, it was the margin that upset us, we were looking for a good performance, something to build on. So we had a meeting during training and we said 'there's two ways the year can go . . .' "

The next night they all went to the Leinster under-21 final. The kids won by two points, with a minor, Rory Jacob, stealing the final score. The game acted on them like a tonic.

By then Liam Griffin had come back to take the occasional session. Ryan recognises the benefits of Griffin's enthusiasm and drive. In a funny way Griffin's presence also bonded the team to Tony Dempsey. It takes a big man to allow a scene-stealing star like Griffin into the dressing-room.

Ditto Martin Storey. All season long Dempsey told the lads that he would take anyone into the panel if they were good enough. Two or three weeks ago Storey starting showing up to help with the numbers in practice games. He's lost little or nothing.

Last Sunday they sprung him.

If anyone minded, they didn't say. This was Martin Storey after all. Ryan just pressed on with life. Having done one cruciate knee ligament at 19 and the other at 21, his knee presented him with another problem in the Limerick game.

His knee cartilage went walkabout.

"In the Limerick game I tore a bit of cartilage. My plan was to get it done last Monday if we'd beaten Tipp and be back training within a week and a half. It sort of tears, and then goes out of place. It went right at the start. I began kicking on it, trying to get it back. It usually goes back into place; afterwards it swells and there's fluid on the knee, that restricted me from training for the two weeks between Limerick and Tipp.

"I knew what it was straight away, your knee catches, you can't straighten it or bend it. Not painful, but frustrating. Eventually, with the kicking and stamping it went back in. It had been catching slightly for a month and a half before, the physio told me it was pinched between two bones. It was getting squeezed between two bones. I forgot about it until an early ball came in and it went."

It's all so matter of fact, without a trace of hubris or design. Darragh Ryan, footballer seems very much of Wexford hurling, at home with its language and its mood. They aren't like other counties down here, they are open to success, any small amount of it.

This week there'll be no nightly meetings, no blood, sweat or tears.

"We'll just get together Wednesday. Very little can be done, we'll have a few words. We'll wait till the last minute to see where we can go. Doesn't sound great does it?" he says with a grin.

Sounds better than he thinks.

This summer was descending into a solemn wake for Leinster hurling. Wexford are up and dressed however. He heads off again, back to his engineering work at New Ross. He slips into the driver's seat of a chunky jeep with an orange flashing siren on top. Just the transport for a full back. He may have absorbed more than he thought.