Euro 2008 qualifying Group D: Cyprus v Republic of Ireland: Tom Humphries on how the central defender has grown up and become as essential to our hopes as we'd always hoped

With apologies to the Cypriot tourist board, here's a slogan: "Not all it's cracked up to be". Not saying that the sea isn't blue or the skies aren't cloudless it's just that recent jaunts have always promised more pleasant times than they have delivered.

Roy saved us once. Shay saved us the last time. Cyprus should be a breeze, shouldn't it? Even the Kerr kids from all those years ago, they seem slightly cursed now. Reel off the names and only two have marquee value anymore. Dunne and Keane, the neighbours from Jobstown in Tallaght.

This weekend they're back on the little island where they once celebrated so deliriously and acknowledged privately that the football world was at their feet. Again Cyprus looms like an iceberg, passively threatening complete disaster.

A year ago it almost happened and Richard Dunne was almost the fall guy.

"We got an early lead," he says. "We felt complacent. We thought we might get a hatful. At the back, though, me and Kenny (Cunningham) kept getting caught on the long diagonal ball. It was a bad night, a bad performance. We didn't play well as a team. Nobody looks back, apart from Shay (Given), and thinks that they did well."

Especially not Dunne. On 14 minutes Cunningham failed to clear a Cypriot cross. It came to Ioannis Okkas, who would be the bane of Dunne's life for 90 minutes. Dunne felled him with a lumberjack's vigour. Penalty.

Tonight they are back in Cyprus. There were 12,500 Irish there 12 months ago. Ten thousand of those have decided Cyprus is not all it's cracked up to be. Tonight's action will be relatively private. And happier? Surely Ireland aren't in danger of performing that badly again?

"No," says Dunne, "it's very possible that we could do that!"

And he gives a look half-amused and half-resigned. He's seen a lot in football and nothing surprises him anymore.

For periods he was down so long that he didn't know which way up was. He has survived and all that he has been through has given him an insulation. Maybe Ireland will perform badly, but wait around and everything changes. Seriously. It does.

Everything changes. The hunt for a world-class manager segues into the bedding-in of Steve Staunton. In our time of need and scandal Lee Carsley metamorphoses in the public imagination, becoming a Roy Keane with Beckenbauer frills. And Cyprus once again becomes a threat to a nascent managerial regime.

Everything.

Dunne is suddenly grown up and as essential to our hopes as we'd always hoped he would be. He sits and takes questions, mulling their implications and reflecting philosophically on a career which was almost wasted.

Things change. Things stay the same. You pays your money and you takes your choice. He almost became the most fascinating and poignant answer to those where-are-they-now questions which Sunday papers pose and answer.

From Everton's FA Youth Cup winning squad, from Ireland's European Under-18 championship winning squad, from a call-up into Mick McCarthy's senior squad which went to Romania nearly 10 years ago. Richard Dunne? Where is he now? He almost became that answer, that car crash.

Changes. First thing you notice is the architecture. Richard Dunne has been overhauled, scraped down and cut back by some minimalist demon. No more does he resemble a sturdy turret standing solid among striplings. They say at Everton he still holds the record for the fastest 100 metres sprint. Somehow he has rediscovered that athlete and chiselled out his form again.

People keep asking him has he lost yet another stone. And another? And another? He reckons he's lost five pounds here and four there and a couple here in the years since he resurrected his career. Never anything so drastic as an entire stone all at once.

He does weights, he talks to Manchester City's conditioning people, but nothing special. He won't be writing the Honey Monster's Guide to Weight Loss any time soon.

The resurrection from ne're-do-well to solid citizen is a touchy subject. A player in his prime now, Dunne is anxious not to be known forever for a wayward youth which looked for a long time as if it would deprive him altogether of a prime.

An automated search on the LexisNexis file of newspaper archives reveals 61 stories containing the words "Richard Dunne" and "alcohol". It's as bad as you'd remembered.

Trawling back through those grim headlines, however, just adds to the sense of wonder you feel at Dunne having sorted himself out so comprehensively and so single-mindedly in the end.

He should be a poster boy for the possibilities of rehabilitation. Dragged away from Home Farm to England at 15 he was in the first team in Everton by the time he was 17. The football culture on Merseyside back then was boozy and glamorous. Richard Dunne was 17 and had too much time and money on his hands.

He hated those stories. Resented them and feared their implications. He ignored the obvious route to stopping them. On a famous night out in Saipan when the Irish team and press corps drank through the night in the Beefeater Bar, dawn arrived with Dunne berating a concerned journalist for the media making his private life any of his business. The irony of being drunk at sunrise less than two weeks before the World Cup kicked off seemed to escape him.

The steady flow of dismal tabloid tittle-tattle played itself out in the usual grubby venues, nightclubs, pubs and parties and culminated famously with that incident on Manchester City's training ground when Kevin Keegan called Dunne over and inquired if the player was drunk. Dunne just nodded. He was a recidivist offender. Keegan, unamused, dangled his football future over the humming shredder.

The PFA intervened to save him and Dunne submitted to a tough love rehab, training three times a day for seven weeks as the club ensured it consumed all of his free time until the habit was broken.

Keegan would join him at eight in the morning, encouraging and cajoling him to run harder, run further. The King of the Bubble Perm is not widely remembered for his services to (or understanding of) the art of defending but his work with Richard Dunne deserves commendation.

Dunne was 27 a few weeks ago. Settled with a young daughter, his life is stripped bare now. No clutter. No fuss.

"I don't live any differently to any footballer. I've grown up. I'm 27 now. I have a daughter. I look after her. I keep myself right.

"You just get over the criticism. You just carry on."

Keeping himself right involves keeping himself in the right company. Habits have changed and so have friends.

"Certain people had to be cut off. Yeah. It's all in the past. I don't think about it anymore. It's happened. I've done it. I've come out on the other side. I'm happy."

It seems a lifetime ago that Dunne was called into that Mick McCarthy squad for a crunch World Cup game in Bucharest. He didn't play but he was marked out as one for the future.

The following year he was Ireland's player of the tournament in Cyprus when Brian Kerr annexed the Under-18 European championship. This was the kid who broke into Everton's first team at 17 years of age and ended his debut season playing five matches back to back in the company of Dave Watson, the caretaker manager.

Yep, 27 a few weeks back.

He's been absent for the best part of his career. When Steve Staunton talks about four-year plans and getting a team ready for 2010, Dunne betrays a slight impatience. He's a man in his prime.

"You understand the manager wants to try new things. You still want to qualify for this tournament, though. Four years is a long time. If we qualify for this one it will benefit players more. We need to store as much experience as we can. Try players out.

"For me it's a tournament that we have a chance of qualifying for and I want us to qualify. I've said this before but for me, Robbie and Duffer, these are our last chances. These few years are the last round-up. It's time to take on our own responsibility. I'd love to play in a major tournament."

Last chances? Last round-up? The golden kids? It's shocking how careers can accelerate past while players are still chuffed at being described as "promising". Dunne at 27 has just 30 caps and is for the first time enjoying a run which looks like it might embed him at the centre of the Irish defence. And he finds himself part of a plan for a tomorrow which might never come.

He's not sure how he came to let the whole thing slip away but he knows he's not for letting anything else escape him.

" I don't know why I haven't played more. Some of it my fault, I suppose. At the start, with Brian (Kerr), say, I was disappointed. When Brian was coming in, I thought I'd get the break at last. Not to start the Scotland game (Kerr's first) was disappointing. I only came on for the last five minutes.

"I never really felt I was needed. If everyone else was injured I'd come over and I'd play a friendly. That was it. Just the way it worked out. Brian stuck with the same 11 players, mainly. A couple in and out. More or less over and done with. I had a lot of injuries during the time as well. I don't look back too much."

" I don't have any regrets that way. I enjoyed it when I played and have been disappointed when I didn't. I can't have regrets about managers not picking me. That was not my choice. I've had a good spell at club level over the last three of four years. I would like to have more caps. Hopefully, the next five or six years will be my time."

When he speaks now he speaks like a captain, a thought which must surely be in Staunton's mind as he digs in for what looks like being a difficult campaign.

Dunne speaks of battle and belief and conviction and a lot of the things which were emblems of Staunton's own career.

"We need more belief," he says, "we seem to take criticism to heart. It affects us. Perhaps it's an Irish thing but it's something we have to get used to. Brush it under the table and start afresh. It comes and goes. Our performance in Germany was a massive improvement. We need the same leap again. We should go into the Cyprus game believing we can win. It's a fixture we should have no fear about. Still have to show them respect. As good as their players are we have better. We have to trust our ability."

Since those seven or eight weeks training alone or with Keegan there have been no more wayward-lad incidents. Dunne's career at City has outlasted Keegan's and will probably outlast Stuart Pearce's. He has taken the club player of the year award and he has taken the captaincy from his central defensive partner, Sylvain Distin.

He has had a few landmark performances for Ireland through the years, especially in Amsterdam and Lisbon, but he has always been fringe fodder. The current regime appears to rate and trust him. Does he feel that? In relation to this team does he feel central and needed? Has he assumed responsibility?

"Not responsibility. I still feel at the early stages of trying to form a partnership with Andy O'Brien. That's the main thing. I've been around the squad for an awful long time but it's still a case of bedding into the team. As you know since Stan has come he has picked me in three games and that's given me confidence that if I keep performing, I'll stay in the team. The more I play the more I'll feel part of it.

"All partnerships come on slowly, though. The most important thing is communication, knowing where your centre-back partner is, him knowing where you are. The more you play, the more it comes naturally. Against Germany it was working, I missed a couple of things and Andy was in behind covering. It's good to have that confidence if you go for something you're being covered if you miss it.

"I wish things had worked out differently when I was younger. I probably wouldn't be the person or player I am now. Things went differently. That's life, that's the way my life has gone. I just look forward to what is in front of me. Looking at Cyprus, if we hope to qualify it's a game we have to win. We'd take another bad performance if we won 1-0, to be honest."

With apologies again to the Cypriot tourist board. What about this: "Cyprus? It could be the first challenge of the rest of your career".