Keith Dugganhears from the former Ireland full back about the circuitous route he has taken from Blackburn via Birmingham to Terryland Park

JEFF KENNA walks through the soft lamplight of a hotel lounge looking out at the world through a fur-lined parka hood. October in Galway and the city is sleepy but the United manager has a million and one things on his mind. He spends his weeks in the west, commuting from Birmingham on a Sunday night and getting back to the family by Saturday lunchtime. And even though nobody ever compared Brum to Rio, he never fails to marvel at the rain-soaked clouds of the West.

"You never get used to it," he smiles, stirring a cup of coffee.

After a football life that saw him sweep through the divisions of England's fabled football towns, Kenna has, since March, been absorbed by every fact and figure and event in the daily existence of Galway United. If he had to choose a moment that illuminated the fact he was no longer in England's football culture, it would be after the draw for the FAI Cup semi-final. As soon as the date was announced, Galway CEO Nick Leeson groaned.

Kenna liked Leeson from the start, when, after meeting him in Salthill, Leeson told him he just had to pop into the bank and lodge some money.

"And I'm not known for that," said Leeson airily, neatly getting the whole Barings Bank scandal, and his own central role in it, out of the way.

Since then, Kenna has quietly marvelled at Leeson, the energy he brings to the job and his wizardry at working out the tiny finances that make the world of difference to Galway United.

As a callow young numbers man, Leeson may have caused the fall of one the pillars of English finance, but now, in the second act of his life, he is unquestionably keeping football going at Terryland, never missing a detail.

So when the draw was made, Leeson groaned and told Kenna Portumna were probably going to be playing a county hurling semi-final that afternoon.

Kenna looked at him quizzically and Leeson said, in his broad Hertfordshire tones, "Portumna might get 20,000 people turning up."

Probably the last person in the world from whom Jeff Kenna ever expected to get a tutorial on Galway hurling was Nick Leeson.

From that point, he knew life in Terryland would be different.

His first coaching job is not without its stresses but it is a path he has chosen, the beginning of his second act. The great dilemma rattling around at the back of the minds of all football men is what to do in the afterlife.

As Kenna made a gracious and tidy exit from the English game, he discovered much to his own surprise he still had that burning for the game and wanted to stay involved. This was not in the retirement plan.

Majorca beckoned. A pretty home in the hills awaited the family: Kenna had done fine during his long and lucrative career in the Premiership, from title-winning days at Blackburn and on to Tranmere, Wigan, Birmingham and Derby County, where he was released in 2006.

The easy life beckoned but when it came down to it, the Kennas were not quite ready to quit Birmingham. So Kenna sent off letters to clubs around England and waited for the post to arrive every day.

"I wasn't getting any joy," he says candidly. "That had been happening for 18 months prior to coming here. Sometimes I wasn't even getting a reply.

"Funny, I had never thought I would be a manager. I always felt there would be too much stress and strain. But I started doing my badges at Derby County anyway. I suppose it was a matter of trying to get a break. And that is where Galway came in."

If Kenna was looking for a crash course, Galway United were happy to provide it. He found himself sitting in the dressingroom in March looking at a group of disenchanted professionals. The team had won just one game in their opening seven. Gate receipts were hardly buoyant. There was vague talk of money being freed up ahead of the transfer window.

"But then the credit crunch kicked in and players had to leave just to get us below the 65 per cent rule. It became a case of either sitting and moaning or accepting it and coming up with a solution within the squad.

"It was a bit low here when I arrived. It couldn't have been any other way. There was discontent and what not. I am sure I made mistakes but I like to think I am a fast learner and whatever mistakes I made were genuine.

"Sometimes you don't have the luxury of sitting back and thinking about your decisions: they have to be instant. Any decision I made was genuine, nothing was ever done out of malice. I just wanted to keep this club together.

"And it has taken us a while but we are getting there. We have had a League Cup semi-final, now we have the FAI Cup semi-final and I'm confident we are going to be in the shake-up to stay up in the last few games. We're playing some decent stuff and getting a few results. It's a fine line."

It is a strange thing, sitting and listening to Jeff Kenna wearing Galway United on his soul. He has changed little from his heyday, with Blackburn Rovers and Ireland, when he was an athletic full back with a fearless attitude and an instinctive smartness that won the trust of a succession of managers.

Alan Ball, Ray Hartford, Roy Hodgson, Kenny Dalglish, Steve Bruce, Jack Charlton, Mick McCarthy - these are the voices Jeff Kenna heard in his dressing-room years.

He is devastatingly honest about his personal potential and limitations as a footballer, joking about the fleecing he took from David Ginola at White Hart Lane on a cold midweek cup night and equally allowing he has had, in comparison to the vast majority, a greatly distinguished career.

He believes luck played a part in it and sometimes thinks back to his initial days as a professional when the Southampton squad featured Jimmy Case, Glen Cockerill, Mickey Adams, Danny Wallace and Mark Wright, all England internationals who had disappeared through injury or age by the time the Premiership was floated on an ever expanding financial bubble.

"These were all top English internationals who didn't earn anything like what I earned from the game and I don't, by any stretch, come in as a top international. You have to have luck to go with the ability or you end up another statistic."

Kenna's luck could be distilled into the stunning transfer whereby he swapped struggling Southampton for Blackburn just as Jack Walker's club were in the midst of a gripping title race against Manchester United.

In Southampton, relegation was the perennial worry: "It depended on whether Matt Le Tissier scored 20 goals a season or 28." Being plucked from that environment and coping with the flightier demands of a traditional club suddenly flooded with the largesse of a captain of industry could have fazed many a professional. But Kenna played every game from March in that title run.

"It was all just a different scale. Everything was done for you at Blackburn. I was like a kid in a sweet shop. We had nine league games left and I played every one.

"I suppose the one that stands out was in Crystal Palace. We won 2-1 and I scored and it was neck and neck with Manchester that day. So scoring that goal felt like my little contribution to Blackburn winning the title."

The relative ease with which he secured the elusive honour of a Premiership title was tempered by his experiences in an Irish shirt. Kenna matured as the glory days were ending. He played in all three unsuccessful qualification play-offs against the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey.

He was part of the XI for that infamous visit to Liechtenstein in the broiling summer of 1995.

"That was my second game," he says, wincing. "You are so eager to do well. I couldn't sleep for weeks. Weeks."

In all, he was capped 27 times for Ireland and was out with an Achilles tendon for the World Cup campaign for Japan and Korea. When the tournament squad was chosen, his name was not included and he knew then his international days were over.

"There was no let-down at all," he says evenly. "I wasn't involved in the squad and it didn't come as a surprise. You don't wish ill on anyone but you can't help thinking about guys losing form or getting injured. But that is just selfish. I knew it was the end.

"I was very thankful to Mick because he had given me the majority of my caps."

That was it. Football is fluid: there is no time for sentiment.

Blackburn sold him to Derby and he kept moving until he was - in the blink of an eye - in his thirties and being presented with an option of joining Kidderminster United. He can't say he didn't hesitate. He can't say that some part of him didn't baulk at the notion.

"I did have to fight myself over it. In the end, I went and played for Kidderminster because I reckoned I was being silly. I had had a good career and they made me a good offer. They are full-time and they are run as professionally as they could be.

"So it would have been an ego thing for me to say no - and I like to think that is what I am not about."

And it was there that he finished his badges and achieved a significant footnote in English football lore in becoming, with Steve Guppy, the first man to play at both the old and new Wembley stadiums. And it was there that he began to ask himself the questions about the game that fascinate him now. Why do some guys make it?

Recently, he was talking with Gary McAllister, the Leeds manager, about that very matter. The Scotsman told him he had been at a conference where Marcello Lippi declared that if he ever had to tell a player anything more than three times when he was Juventus coach, that player was not good enough to remain in Turin. It tied into what Kenna feels is a fundamental requirement of any elite player.

"I think it is decision making. Players who make the majority of the right decisions at the right time play at the highest level. Technique - there are guys who have all the tricks of the Premier League games, but when they have the ball it's about knowing what to do with it. So what Lippi said stuck with me. You can coach it - up to a point. There are technically very good players in the English Conference but the decision making sorts it out."

For the record, he believes the best League of Ireland club could challenge any English Championship club and survive in that division and that the rest would probably be of League One, League Two or Conference standard.

"There are some real quality football players playing in Ireland. Nobody should think otherwise. On any given day, the top five clubs here would challenge a Championship team but I am not sure if they could sustain a season.

"But with the league trying to get everyone going full time and the financial implications - I think there is a lot of backing from the construction industry so that has a knock-on effect - we all have our worries."

Last month, the family came over to Galway to visit and Kenna took his girls, Sophia and Francesca, to a beach past Barna. It was sunny but windy and the water was freezing but they swam anyway and left shivering and delighted. It was a far cry from Majorca.

In a sense, Jeff Kenna has taken the more difficult option by coming to Galway United, rejecting the predictable post-life of golf and leisure time for the hard pressure of managing a pressed-upon club.

He is under no illusions. Once upon a time he muscled up against Eric Cantona and Thierry Henry and the other revered names of the modern English game. Today he moves in a land far, far removed from his old stamping ground now run by tycoons like Roman Abramovich.

Maybe he will be back there someday. But for now, Galway United against Derry City is all he cares about. Like he said about those sensational days in Blackburn, it's all a different scale. But it is still the game he knows.