Hurling Championship 2005:He stands apart. Old-fashioned in his views and in his devotion to excellence. Tom Humphries talks to the Waterford manager.

You've never really thought about what he does. Somehow, perhaps, you always assumed he was a teacher, a man with chalk-dusted cuffs and a staffroom fixture, the one who lingers in the evening to take kids out on to a patch of green to reveal unto them the eternal beauty of hurling.

That was the image of him you retained until you called his mobile and he directed you to the oil company offices set in the patchwork development of Cork's largest business park. The light deluges into Justin McCarthy's corner office from two sides, thoroughly disclosing the pristine habitat of an orderly man. Himself, he sits immaculate, straight and thoughtful behind his desk, with face and bearing redolent of Martin Sheen's, President Bartlett in The West Wing.

Around him the clutter and detritus of office life is so conspicuously absent that you could be sitting in a showroom designed to display office furniture in flattering ways.

On the walls are a couple of photographs, the results of the lone explorations into flora and fauna which McCarthy sometimes takes in pursuit of a fine shot. One photo taken in Dingle from a high field overlooking the bay has some sheep ruminating in a field while a rainbow arches the bay and the clouds make theatre. The nearest sheep, the handsome one in the foreground, has a thick blue stripe painted on him, making him look like the ovine representation of a Waterford hurler.

"Waterford!" says McCarthy as you point to the animal. His laugh suggests you aren't the first to have commented.

You wonder fleetingly if Justin didn't wrangle the sheep himself, worrying him, bringing him down and then painting that stripe on to the woolly barrel of belly. His dedication, his lively mind, his relentlessness in the chase of the correct result.

He would. He could. Couldn't he? Not really. He couldn't go so long without thinking about hurling.

Justin McCarthy is 60 years old next month. He works in this industrial estate outside Cork for Top, the oil people. He likes the company. Feisty outsiders, battling for their niche against the big boys.

That's always been a stance which seduces him. When that 60th birthday rolls around, though, he will retire as required and do a little consultancy work. For a man so vital and so on top of his game, that sounds like a prison sentence.

"It'll give me more time for the hurling," he says happily. End of discussion.

This is a big summer for Waterford and for Justin McCarthy. Some people make them favourites for the All-Ireland, and even their detractors concede that it's as possible to envisage them lifting silver in September as it is to imagine them crashing and burning by midsummer.

Last year they set down another mark in their long ascent. An effervescent Munster final win against Cork should have teed up their season. Instead, they had a six-week break before facing Kilkenny and spent half a game getting into the pace of it. They lost, but they finished strong. The managed not to relinquish the game in the distracted way they might have done a few years ago.

But, of course, Cork weren't dead and they galloped past for an All-Ireland. Enough food for a winter of regret. "Of course it hurt, I hate to lose," says McCarthy. "I'm a bad loser. Especially if there is a chance of winning. It hurt. It hurt, too, that the Munster final was played down by some people.

"If Cork and Tipp were playing in it they'd still be talking about it. We got the breaks that day maybe, but we didn't want to stop there. I didn't want to stop there. Others have to make that decision too."

Players? Do you think they didn't make that decision last year?

"Well no, to be straight, I didn't get that feeling. But when you are up against experience and tradition every tiny thing counts. Who knows? It's new territory for fellas. They won a Munster Championship a little while ago after 39 years. The chance is there now to go further. They know that."

He's thought about that loss to Kilkenny on many nights since. They missed John Mullane, badly, "that spark, that bit of unorthodox hurling, having a fella who takes a bit of watching, we missed that".

They suffered in the six-week break while Kilkenny got games which roughed them up and sharpened them. And they made outfield mistakes for the early goals they offered up. "I don't want to make excuses for losing a game. Sometimes it's the little rub of the green. Sometimes it's other small things. It wasn't want of belief though. When we got to the pace of the game we were pressuring them and catching them.

"The belief was there. Whatever it is, it's not belief separating us from an All-Ireland anymore. We're quite close. You never know exactly how far away you are. It could be one breaking ball, but I think we've broken the barrier. The fear is not there."

This year belief is the mantra for Waterford. If they are to escape the trough of unfashionability they occupy to a really big and happy day in Croke Park, faith matters.

Faith matters. Fashion doesn't. He's an unfashionable man, Justin McCarthy. He knows there is no dignity in being a thinking reed. He doesn't bend in the prevailing winds. Take an old photograph of Justin McCarthy. Blow away the dust. He looks the same then, 30, 35 years ago as he does now. Fashion bypasses him. Hurling remains constant. A passion and a vocation.

He went in his career as a manager to the places where regents of hurling never went. He went to Antrim long, long ago. He went to Clare in the 1970s. He went to an ailing Cashel team. He went to Waterford.

"I'm very close to God," he tells you, and instantly you know he doesn't mean Frank Murphy. "I get great support from the Man Above. He's my best friend every day. You need mental strength and ideas. He's always been there with me. I try to keep on his side. Maybe this is my calling."

And as he talks you can believe it. If the best use of a life is to do passionately and well the things which you are gifted at, well, Justin McCarthy has made fine use so far of his three-score years. Hurling won't leave him alone. Nor he it.

They are meant for each other, and for all that the game has given him, well, his idiosyncratic character has brought something different to the game. He's a one-off. His own self. He's a fan of just about every sport, but he was openly disappointed about the outcome of the Rule 42 debate.

"I'd hate to have anything to dilute the game itself or the association. People today want an easy way out. We're very affluent and cosy as a nation. We take softer options."

Perhaps he has earned the right to exclude himself from that collective pronoun. He stands apart. Old-fashioned in his views and in his devotion to excellence. If a thing is worth doing . . . "If I'm cutting the grass it's done right," he says with a passion which could scorch the lawn. "If I'm putting on my shirt and tie I want it done as best I can. Folding my tracksuit? I want to be as good as I can at it. I'm a man in a hurry. I hate lazing around, I hate waiting for it. Let's do it."

Let's do it. When he retired from intercounty hurling at the age of 30, he was already deeply involved in coaching. A year later he was in the big time. "It's 30 years ago this year since I stepped into Walsh Park with a Cork team to play Waterford. I was still only 30. I could safely say there's been so many great moments. I love to see someone develop their talent, to get a love for the game and succeed. I get as much joy out of an under-14 team winning a championship as I would out of winning a Munster Championship."

Life is an unbroken thread. He lives now in the patch where he was born and wouldn't live anywhere else. He played his last club game in 1991; he was 46 then, but a couple of times this week he went out walking the back fields with his dog and his sliotar and a hurley.

And scarcely a night goes by at training in Waterford when he doesn't throw a few broken sticks into the boot of the car torepair in some stolen moment when his hands on the splintered grain of the ash gives him a tactile sense of the game's soul.

Famously, in the 1960s he watched an All-Ireland final from a wheelchair on the sideline, having been badly injured when travelling pillion on a motorbike to training. You wonder if the two years he endured out of the game fed this undwindling hunger. He laughs. You didn't know him. You don't know him. Passion was as natural as a limb.

"Listen, when I had the accident I was down the field on crutches in Passage training the lads. I didn't have to refuel. I loved being able to just tap a ball against a wall, balance a ball on the stick sitting in the chair. I have a small little pitch behind the house. I'll go out for half an hour or an hour. I still get the same kick out of it. Before the accident. After it."

You don't understand or fathom it, this love. God, country, game. "It's my way of showing my Irishness," says Justin. "It's a symbol of Ireland. It's unique."

It colonises so many waking hours and minutes. He is thinking about the game in the shower in the morning. He is thinking about it lying in bed at night. At lunchtime he realises little drills have been coalescing in his head all morning, just presenting themselves as solutions to players' problems and weaknesses.

So he'll put shape to them on a piece of paper, work out the mechanics. He has a million hurling drills in his head. Prescriptions for every malady and ailment a player can have.

He thinks about the team and the balance of it. Last night's training. Next Sunday's match. What he learned. He believes in the ball. Focusing on it. Training with it always. They play hard games among themselves in training and Justin referees them himself. Keeping the whistle away from his mouth as if it might threaten him with contagion.

"I don't give too many frees. I want intensity. I want passion. You have to develop players to a level. Players don't know what level they can go to. The right application and coaching and advice, they can go to an awful lot of levels they never dreamed of."

In two weeks they begin again. The old familiar. Cork and Waterford in Thurles. A season's opener which represents the perfect marriage of time and place, experience and aspiration. He has the day mapped in his head already. The secluded pitch where they will walk and train, their routine for big days in Thurles.

It's a day that not everyone will enjoy, but he says the rewards are so great, the satisfaction so pure that it's worth it. It's worth the risk of making a mistake, it's worth still having the guts to come out on to the ball first. And anyway, if you want nothing but happy days you should stay away from senior intercounty hurling.

He has set himself a private timescale for what he wants to achieve with Waterford. The seasons go past and he must know he is getting there. He has brought them to a new level, set them down on the threshold. He has provided the next generation with some heroes and some inspiration . This last part is as important as silverware.

"I went down to Baltimore recently. Beautiful. The next parish out there is past Fastnet. America. About 40 people turned up, in this place where they've never had hurling. It was a handsome morning, a handsome day, and these 40 boys and girls with their sticks.

"I was looking at them and looking over to Carbery's 100 Isles. There's great happiness in just teaching them the skills and the drills. This is a treasure we have. Doing things with a hurley and a ball. That's exciting. It's a brilliant game. We haven't sold the game enough to people. With Waterford, we've sold the game to the kids coming up, I hope."

It's a demanding life at Justin McCarthy's level of operation and expertise, and he knows deep down he has missed out on certain things in life because of the singularity of his devotion. But a calling has consolations.

"I love the walks, going out through the woods. I got some acorns on a walk down in Killarney last year and I set 10 of them. I looked the other day and they were this height (he raises his hand, so high, a foot or so above the glazed tan of his desktop). I looked at them and said to myself that I've achieved something."

He pauses.

"I'd like an All-Ireland championship too, of course."