The Galway press night descends into a sort of amiable chaos. Journalists stand like stricken sheep for two hours in the drizzle at Pearse Stadium. Then they stand for an hour indoors establishing that the players aren't there. A quick snowfall of rumours and a chase down to the Sacre Couer Hotel in Salthill where the boys are eating dinner in a backroom. Well, some of them.

Over his dinner, Eugene Cloonan looks jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof. He hates interviews in the way kids hate dentists. He's already taken a journalist to task for some printed piece of harmlessness and now, as they flock about him, his loquaciousness is diminishing with every addition to his audience. He runs dry pretty quickly and people drift away. You get him on his own and propose, herald of trumpets, a big interview. Poor man. He winces as the pain shoots through him.

"Is this for before the final?"

"Well, yeah."

"I'd prefer not to. Really."

"But it's a press night."

"I know but . . . ."

You push and push against his shyness, against his determined reticence. When the answers eventually come they are short and polite and tailored to fit his all-consuming modesty.

Of all the Galway players, Cloonan is the one who best approximates to being a box-office figure. He's the gun, the hitman, the star. He's the kid with the shaven head and the hunger for goals with the mantle of hurling's next superstar to cope with.

That's a fate he rails against. He likes his hurling stripped bare with none of the fuss or attention. If this All-Ireland could be played out in private it would suit Eugene Cloonan just fine. Please, no questions, no write-ups, no headlines, he says, before finally he relents. There'll be questions. There'll be answers.

Short answers. He can't remember an introduction to hurling in his childhood, the game was always just there.

"Everyone played. I don't remember any of that stuff like getting my first stick or my first game. We played out in the field from the time we could walk and when we were big enough we were brought down to the club and we played away there."

By the time he was brought down to the club, Athenry had begun to thrive. Once, back in the early part of the century, Athenry de Wets had been something of a football power, but hurling's grip on the imagination of the parish was copperfastened when Tom Cloonan, Eugene's father, became principal of the local national school in the early 1980s.

Soon teams from the school were winning and winning well. The contagion of excellence spread to the club, where more Cloonans loomed to apply the finishing touches.

The talent being produced in the school was too good and too plentiful to ignore. At the club, Tom and Jarlath Cloonan put the finishing touches on the first wave of players to emerge, fellas like Joe Rabbitte and Brendan Keogh in their midst. Minor championships came in 1986, '87 and '88. Under-21 titles seemed inevitable. Five in succession arrived from '87 to '91. Then a little lull until more minor championships in '93, '94 and '95 and under-21s in '94 and '98.

By the end of that orgy of underage success Athenry had become one of the country's premier hurling clubs. The first of three All-Ireland club championships in five years came in '97. By then, Eugene Cloonan was 17. By then, he was ready.

Life in Athenry revolved around hurling. Having a father as teacher, coach and mentor merely meant it was easier for a sublime talent to ignite. On the rare occasions when there was nobody around, Cloonan bashed a ball against a wall. When there was company, hurling was the only language they spoke. Almost permanently in summer holidays they had the school's set of goalposts set in the field outside. To pass and not see the Cloonans out hurling with each other would have been as odd as to wake and find all the stone walls in Connacht gone.

"We practised alright. When you're young, you don't notice the days going by. We'd be out there, myself and the brothers and sometimes a few friends, and we'd hurl all day."

They noted him early down at the field in Raheen, saw his skills, and put him on teams quickly just so he'd get the feel. He won his first under-14 championship playing in goals as an 11-year-old, his first minor at 14 and so on. Bigger things followed, of course, but they maintained that pattern, letting him play in goals as he burgled into a new grade at some unlikely age, then setting him loose outfield. It was a low-risk strategy. He was a fine 'keeper anyway.

For a hero he had PJ Molloy, who lived perhaps five miles away, but whose local celebrity had yet to be extinguished by the time Eugene came to appreciate such things. And Athenry was turning out more, of course. They reckon that Cloonan would sacrifice anything tomorrow to ensure that Joe Rabbitte gets the reward that constancy deserves.

Pat Nally came to Athenry a long time ago. A Mayo man and a football man, he was soon taken into the mainstream, local faith. He remembers from the time of Tom Cloonan's appointment as principal, the parish was developing into a hurling stronghold.

By the time he answered the door to PJ Molloy about five years ago, and listened quietly as Molloy talked him into taking over the club senior team, he realised he was being handed an opportunity.

"So many good players had come through, but I can't remember how early Eugene would have been recognised. Always, maybe. There wasn't a day that sticks out when everyone said 'he'll be great'. He was just always gifted, the best I've seen. All the skills, better than the best at training, totally dedicated. Remarkable for a young lad. No drinking, nothing while the hurling is on. And yet he fits in so well, he's just a lovely, quiet lad and no sense of him that he knows what a great hurler he is."

They speak of his earnestness about hurling and he acknowledges it himself.

"Yeah, I'd be serious enough about it. You get out of it what you put in. I've had lots of good days."

And the big disappointment?

He thinks for the longest time.

"I was left off the county team at under-16 and never told why. That was a bad disappointment alright. Not saying I had any right to be on it, just not being told why I was dropped."

Disappointment. And some reckless mentoring. Cloonan never met a grade of hurling he wasn't able for.

Remember when he was 17, his legend still nascent? The 1997 All-Ireland Club Final brought Athenry up against a rising tide. Wolfe Tones of Shannon were riding the great wave of Clare hurling and if the team lacked an even spread of talent, they had mental fortitude and defending ability to spare with the two Lohans, Brian and Frank, in defence. Everything drove from there.

Athenry hadn't much trouble identifying Brian Lohan's spirit and excellence as the main obstacle to winning the title. They could try to play around Lohan or they could challenge him. They chose the latter route and gave the job to the skinny kid with the short hair. Eugene Cloonan, number 14.

Pat Nally remembers how he went about it, a 17-year-old David pitched against Brian Lohan, the peerless Wolfe Tones Goliath.

"He assembled a video library of Brian Lohan performances, Munster finals, All-Irelands, he looked at the way he played and he practised playing certain ways against him. On the day he did big damage to Wolfe Tones."

Duly Athenry prevailed. If not all of Eugene Cloonan's nine points were picked from the pocket of Brian Lohan, or taken from play, the principal damage to Wolfe Tones' morale was inflicted under the posts. The performance marked his arrival.

They've got used to him running in big scores now. Big days he's had plenty; 1-7 on his debut v Roscommon in 1997, 1-4 against Tipperary in the last year's All-Ireland quarter-final.

In Derry, they use his name to scare children up to bed. In '97, he scored 2-10 against Derry in the All-Ireland under-21 semi-final. This year he muscled 2-11 off them in the All-Ireland quarter-final. He scored 2-10 v Clare in the All-Ireland quarter-final replay of 1999, another 2-9 against Kilkenny last month, and so on. His nine championship appearances to date (eight starts) have brought him a Careyesque total of 8-51.

He has developed a knack for goalscoring and an ability to convert even a quiet game into a decent scoring performance.

"I don't know why I score goals. I suppose playing outside with the brothers and the friends that was always the thing. Goals. You'd have a go from everywhere, just to be one up on one of them."

So he gets them anyway he can. He's on the record as saying he'll often try for a goal off a free in Croke Park because it's when everyone expects you to play safe. His goals against Kilkenny last month had the mark of the opportunist about them. In certain parts of Kilkenny, that brace will have brought home memories from April and the All-Ireland club final. Cloonan bursting out of a thicket of players leaves his hurley behind, scoops up one belonging to his marker, Paddy O'Dwyer, and finishes one-handed to the net with it. It's the last minute, of course, and his score sends the game to extra-time. Roy of the Rovers lacks imagination by comparison.

When you ask him to pick a goal from the hundreds he's scored he chooses that one as being the one he enjoyed most, "because it was for the club and lads I'd grown up with".

"People ask what makes us so close," says Pat Nally, "what keeps the players together. Try doing a four-mile run in winter and then finishing with a few runs up and down Katleen Bane's Hill. About 70 metres up and a 45 degree gradient. That's the work that goes into a club championship and there's none of the lads from Athenry would have been lacking for fitness when they joined up with Galway after the club championship this year."

They didn't and their return has added the final cutting edge to Galway's campaign. In Athenry they look back on when the success began with Joe Rabbitte's team and note that Eugene Cloonan was almost a man by the time it translated into senior honours. It is pretty much the same with Galway. Lots of light, flashy, underage teams need to go into the grinder to produce a fine senior side. They think they have got there now. To nobody's surprise, Eugene Cloonan has survived the whittling process. Quietly his legend expands.

Tipperary have their own memories of him. Last year's quarter-final and things were nicely balanced early on when Cloonan stepped up to take a 21-yard free. Tipp took the precaution of flooding their goal-line with players, but elsewhere pens hovered over paper waiting to credit Cloonan with a point. He drove it wickedly home to the net. A goal plucked from childhood in the back garden. Tipp never quite recovered.

Phillip Maher's memories of Cloonan need stretch back to a generally pleasant day in Ennis this past April when the league semi-final fell to Tipperary in circumstances which nobody quite took seriously. Philly will remember Eugene Cloonan coming in as a sub in the second half with the game's outcome pretty much settled. Cloonan dabbled in the game at his will and the four points he placed in brackets after his name was the smallest part of the trouble he caused. Galway lost and lost big, but some markers were left behind nonetheless.

The prevailing wisdom is that this hurling summer has been overshadowed by football and marked by transition. If so, the next generation promises as much as the last. Cloonan, Kelly and O'Neill of the young forwards on view tomorrow are already extraordinary.

For Cloonan, whose graph has been steady all along (excluding a suspension for striking in an under-21 club game), the time has come.

At 22, he is finished with the dash and derring-do of underage days. The hurling decade ahead is his for the taking. Names like Kelly and O'Neill will always be close to him, but tomorrow he gets a chance at a head start. Close to five o'clock we'll know what distance he has put between himself and the other young guns.