You don't easily lose sight of the fact that Michael Bond is a headmaster. In the principal's office at St Brigid's VS, Loughrea, he tells you: "You have until four o'clock". (Turn over your papers.)

Bond is as weird a story as this already bizarre hurling season has thrown up. Unknown at the beginning of July, he now stands on the threshold of bringing Offaly to an All-Ireland title. He presents it as a kind of intriguing pastime he chanced upon.

After July 5th when then Offaly manager Babs Keating, in full post-defeat flow, had criticised his players once too often, the fall-out led to his resignation just days after the undistinguished Leinster final defeat by Kilkenny.

By Friday Offaly had appointed Bond as his successor. Manager of the Galway side which won the 1983 All-Ireland under-21 title, Bond hadn't involved himself in inter-county hurling for nearly all the intervening years.

Appointed to the current job in 1985 - a job he says "consumes" him "more than any job in the world" - the world of hurling receded on his horizon. The intense demands of running a large, successful school prohibited any involvement at the top level.

But fortunately, the one set of circumstances which could tempt him suddenly emerged. A team still in the championship at the beginning of July found it needed a manager. Bond is coy about the precise detail of his appointment.

"The only thing I'd say about that is that they needed a manager and I happened to be there. July and August provided me with the free time and I felt sorry for what had happened in Offaly. I didn't really like what was said on either side.

"I suppose it was a great opportunity to take a team to an All-Ireland final. It is something I would be quite confident of doing. I have been coaching all my life."

Now 50, Bond was a muscular centrefielder with his club Ardrahan and played at both minor and under-21 levels for Galway. In the 1960s before the Coiste Iomana reforms began to bite, playing for the county wasn't going to fill the house with trophies.

Furthermore his focus wasn't exactly single-minded. While at UCC he spent summers in the US and then with exquisite timing, dropped out of the panel at the start of the 1974-75 National League, the trophy with which Galway were to signal their modern revival only months later.

Unenthused at the prospect of a winter's hurling in Division Two, he decided to take to rugby with Ballinasloe and also golf which he still plays off a handicap of six.

So, into this busy life came the Offaly hurlers. Bond is cautious about the controversy which preceded him.

"It's an amateur sport. I would find it very hard to criticise any of the Offaly players because they're not being paid. It would be difficult for a team of professionals. I think that if you're criticised it should be done privately. I'd be quite critical of players but hopefully that would be kept within the dressingroom. And if I've anything to say to players, I'll say it to their face.

"The first thing was that I didn't look back at any of the difficulties. I didn't question what had happened, why anybody had left. I was hoping to get over the quarter-final, hoping to avoid Galway and possibly beat Antrim.

"I wasn't at all confident against Antrim, I just wanted time. Time to get injured players back. Once they came back, training went well. We have a very nice routine now and they enjoy it."

His appointment left the Offaly players nonplussed. None of them had a notion who he was when he addressed them in his soft, clipped tones one night in Tullamore. If anyone is searching for a clue as to how this man, long a stranger to the inter-county scene, has made the impact he has, it's probably to be found in the players.

Offaly have a tremendously talented bunch of players. From a remarkable crop of underage teams (three All-Ireland minor titles in four years), they missed out at under-21 but won the 1994 senior All-Ireland with five minutes of scorched-earth hurling which reduced to rubble Limerick's easy domination of the final.

Yet they were always hard to motivate. Not enough strength-in-depth to threaten out-of-form players back into form and an at times frustrating - but also occasionally endearing - habit of not sharing the modern trend towards physical and mental intensity. Just hurlers - but on their day, untouchable hurlers.

After all, when's the last time anyone turned Offaly over in a championship match. Bad as they have been at times this season, their results have frequently been better than they deserved.

Remember how they beat Wexford in the Leinster semi-final after being outplayed for much of the match and how they responded to Clare when the inexorable champions went 10 points clear with half an hour to play.

Bond is upbeat about the whole progression and doesn't recognise the disruptive panel of players of popular repute.

"I haven't encountered that at all. I'd heard that too. People said to me, `this is a poisoned chalice' but I've had no difficulty whatsoever. We have our disagreements like anyone, but that's it.

"When everyone was healthy and we had a number of options. I liked the way they were playing, I liked their commitment and I liked their attitude. I did feel they were going to do well against Clare. I did feel that we possibly had the edge on Clare in hurling ability, not on fitness, not on stamina. We had plans to counteract Clare and it worked for two and a half games."

The thing he liked most about Offaly was the players - and he told them so. A bunch of hurlers weary of all the accusations of under-achievement, of all the attendant hassle and of being criticised in public by their manager, were now training under a man who sympathised with them and spoke of his admiration for Offaly hurling from the start.

(When young Ger Oakley bridled at being substituted in the replay and absented himself from the panel, Bond took the trouble to coax him back in - rather than leave the player to regret bitterly an act of impetuosity.)

Did his players also feel under pressure for having effectively removed Babs Keating? And was that the ultimate reason underlying the vast improvement in performance? Bond isn't so sure.

"Maybe to an extent, but the major motivating factor for them was that Clare beat them in the 1995 All-Ireland final. They felt that they were the better team on the day, not that that gives you a God-given right to win. But I think that was the chief factor."

He himself was in good form going into the Clare match, but admits that referee Jimmy Cooney's time-keeping error in the second match saved them and gave them more momentum going into the refixture in Thurles.

"I was very confident at the start. But I wasn't as confident for the second game as I was for the first because I was afraid we'd get cocky. I let it go to the second half and took drastic action at half-time. I'd have taken it sooner if Paudie Mulhare (the Offaly player whose father died the weekend of the match) was available.

"There might have been a few bangs on the table with hurleys and things (at half-time) but I knew the cockiness had to have gone out of them - that they had as a result of the first game - because Offaly hurling was supposedly back on the straight and narrow, they were heroes, but they hadn't beaten Clare.

"But we were lucky, lucky. There was no guarantee we were going to get a goal. I would have preferred to be in Clare's position. Having got back into action for the third day, I was quite confident and in the end a little bit surprised we didn't put Clare away easier than we did. We had chances and didn't take the chances."

In management terms, the switches made to bring Offaly back from the dead in the second Clare match were very impressive. But as a chastened Brian Whelahan - having undergone a rare roasting at wing back - began to run rampant after a switch to the forwards, the thought occurred that this might be no more scientific than rolling dice.

"No. Everything was planned. We have various provisional plans. These are all discussed. That's (moving Whelahan) always there. He can play equally well in the forward line or midfield."

So there was actually a plan for Whelahan playing badly in defence?

"No, no, no. If we were behind by more than a few points, he could be brought forward. So could Kevin Martin who plays centre forward for his club. You just don't wonder about those things. You plan for them."

He is happy enough contemplating Sunday's All-Ireland final, a challenge few would have expected him to be facing that night in July when news of his appointment trickled through. Kilkenny are more in the ascendant than has been the case in recent years. After the Leinster final win, they handed Offaly a hefty defeat in Bond's first challenge match.

Still he believes the mood is now right and that minds are focused on the job in hand.

"I was terrified the hype wouldn't have gone, the expectation wouldn't have died down. We've won nothing yet. At least Kilkenny are Leinster champions."