Dessie Farrell sighs. Phew! You want a brief history of time, well it goes like this. First, the good days fled so fast that he was looking back on them before he'd realised they were here. Then the bad times came quickly and lingered long.

Somewhere in between, on the border between good times and bad, Dessie Farrell spent his best years. His decade with the Dubs has a single peak and many troughs. The country behind should be prettier.

Does 1995 seem that all that long ago? Longer. There's been 100 years of Dub decrepitude since then. Nineteen-ninety-five is another country.

He thinks he might finish up next year, closing the door on an epic career and depriving Dublin football of its best and most reliable forward of the current era. When Dessie Farrell mentions in passing that he might finish next season you can't help thinking that he deserves more than one sweet September to take away with him. Few players have carried themselves with such diligence through thick and thin.

Especially thin. Since he made his debut in 1990, stealing four minutes against Armagh in the league, he has had an injury list which has kept him below the watermark for several seasons. Nineteen-ninety-one was lost altogether. The last three years were struggles against himself.

Then there were the good times. He recovered to make the Dublin panel in 1992. On standby to board the Titanic as it turned out. He'd spent summers up in his mother's home place in Glencolumbcille in Donegal and wound up marking Noel Hegarty whom he'd known from childhood. Farrell was quiet and a little bit of an outsider in the team then and was completely unaware that the rest of the squad had been in full celebration mode for a week or so already.

"I was oblivious. I was a lowly corner forward, new on the team. They weren't chasing me around looking for this, that and the other. I was lucky to get my boots and me bit of training gear that week. I never knew what was going on. Lads were doing it and not saying it in the dressing-rooms. It had been so long since Dublin's last All-Ireland it was a trap fellas fell into."

Dublin scarcely knew who they were marking. Donegal had meticulous little files done on everyone.

"We thought we'd just hit the ball into Vinnie and we'd lift the Sam. It was a few days before I realised the significance of what had happened, we'd been beaten in a final."

It was frustrating. If he let himself he could feel bitter about how things worked out. He played '92 to '94 out in the corner which at that time was Dublin football's equivalent of Siberia. You either grew old there or froze to death and were replaced.

"The style we played, there'd be half backs and, if they could get away with it, corner backs soloing past me and Mick Galvin. Passing the ball to us was the absolute last resort. I always felt I should have been outfield.

"Then in 1995 the clamps were put on the lads and I got my chance and got an All-Ireland and an All Star. I remember thinking this is great, I'm in my prime and now I'm in my best position and I was injury free in 1996 and 1997 but the team was gone way off the mark and you were nearly forgotten. It was only me worrying about being the player I thought I could have been. Then I had three years of injuries, so I think sometimes I really only got one year at it. I could feel a bit sorry for myself at times."

He laughs.

"Because nothing took away from 1995. Everything else made me appreciate it the more. I try to salvage as much as I can because a lot of it is a blur. I'm sorry I didn't keep a diary or something. Since then the good days you appreciate them all the more. You always thought next year and next year. It never comes so you say to yourself how lucky you were to get it."

He has evolved as a person of course. In 1992 he was spike-haired, "the young pup" on the team and played where he was told. By 1995 he was campaigning to be liberated from the corner. By 1998 he was team captain. Now he is chairman of the Gaelic Players' Association, his rise to prominence among his peer group a tribute to the quiet intelligence and integrity he brings to things

"I took great confidence from 1995. I suppose that side of me, the being a pain in the ass in the dressing-room side, the mouthing off began the next year. Since then I've tried to fine-tune it to constructive criticism."

Tom Carr made Farrell captain as soon as he became manager in 1998. Farrell felt comfortable with the job even though there were problems ahead.

"It was difficult at first. I was a few years younger and there were still some more senior guys. I had to be careful what I said. If I stood on someone's toes well and good, if not then all the better. In the last year or two it's been straight-forward."

Carr had been Dublin captain himself but Farrell remembers him as a different type.

"He was funny. He was somewhat aloof as captain. He was very nice and sound to talk to one to one but none of the lads got to know him well. It was renowned anyway, that team, for being very cliquish - there was the Hanlon's Corner crew (those northsiders who drank in Hanlon's Corner Pub) and the southside crew and then there was the crew that nobody wanted to be in. It was very cliquish and it was hard for Tommy to gell everyone together so fellas were left to their own devices.

"When he came in as manager I knew he'd be very good because of his captaincy. He was very serious and thoughtful. I get on very well with him. If I was ever to take up that job myself the greatest endorsement would be for the players to be 100 per cent there for you. He has that, even through the team's difficult times."

The early days of the current regime were tough for both Farrell and Carr. Both played with some of the senior guys. "He handled it very well," says Farrell. "He didn't wipe the slate clean straight away. As time went on he let them loose, let some guys go."

And Farrell?

"Yeah , definitely I was stuck in the middle there. It's a fact that I would have campaigned to get Keith (Barr) back. Tommy would have perceived me to be in Keith's camp as I would have originally been in the Hanlon's crew. But as time went on I just let it go and didn't bother any more. In the end I think the lads, fellas like Keith Barr and Paul Bealin and others, were offered every opportunity.

"I'm sure if you asked a couple of those fellas they'd think I was part responsible for them going, with me being captain and them not getting back, but I can hold my hand on my heart and say I did everything possible and probably spent more time focusing on those guys than I should have been doing on the guys in the panel. For a while. That was difficult but it subsided and something else came along to worry about."

The GPA has been one of those things. Perhaps the shrewdest move the association has made in its brief existence was in the appointment of its most prominent people. It would be hard to pick any three active players more universally respected than Farrell, James O'Connor and SΘamus Moynihan.

The players' association has evolved under their guidance. The big heap of files and folders at one end of Farrell's living-room give testament to the way in which energies are now being filed. The big stunts (which Farrell views as having been necessary as a calling card) are over and the GPA is an intense lobby group which has recently commissioned an auditor's report to discover, among other things, how much an average intercounty career costs the average player. The report will be released in a couple of weeks but the figure of £145,000 surprised even Farrell. Until he thought about it.

He talks about Dublin, how his GPA work as much as his captaincy of the team has made him worry about the future of the games in the capital. He lives in soccer country and has noted just up the road in Tallaght, the IRFU getting organised and putting its claim in for the hearts and minds of kids. The GAA needs a grand plan. Then it needs a few local heroes.

You never know where the heroes will come from or what turn the story will take.

Dessie Farrell has sat in happy Dublin dressing-rooms that were sure that they'd just caused the end of the Seβn Boylan era and had just put paid to Mick O'Dwyer. And he's sat in losing dressing-rooms and waited for Boylan or O'Dwyer to pop a head around the door and say "thanks for the game lads, I'm sure ye'll be back another day".

Last Saturday Dublin took a spin down to Thurles to get a gallop on the fabled pitch there. The Dubs figured that the wide open prairies of Semple Stadium might suit them, then they figured Kerry might feel the same thing. It's football, though, and surprise is part of the package. When he thought about it, for instance, Dessie Farrell realised that Kerry were nothing special to him. He began going to games on his own in 1985 just as Dublin and Kerry ended as a phenomenon. He looked around and most of his team-mates were younger than him.

One of his few memories of the great Dublin team of the 1970s belongs to his father Paddy. Playing junior football for St Brendan's one Saturday morning he squared up to one Paddy Cullen of O'Connell's Boys. Afterwards he saw Cullen lurking at the pavilion at the end of the Brendan's pitch. Cullen spotted Paddy Farrell and marched towards him. Here we go, thought his father, but Cullen's hand was outstretched.

Dessie went to St Vincent's CBS in Glasnevin. Got his first Dublin jersey when he was 15. A teacher, John Horan, offered him a trial for Dublin if he would skip a hockey match on Saturday and play under-16 for him. Deal done. Dessie got three years at minor and by the time he was finished Paddy Farrell was shouting for the Blues.

What's there to shout for this afternoon?

Dessie Farrell wants to know.

"Being part of the panel, etc, I'd hold them in high regard, I'd say they are talented, they work hard but then I'd say that about most of the other teams in the country. The question is whether we have the mental capacity and the resolve within to go on and do something. That's a criticism that's been levelled at us and rightly so. We haven't produced. Until we beat a Kerry or a Meath that doubt will always be there. We say in the dressing-room always that we'll answer the critics. Sometimes we should be saying that we'll answer our own questions today. We need to do it for ourselves first and foremost. Forget about Kerry or the critics, we need to know that we are as good as we like to think we are."

So Dessie Farrell sets off again this morning. Once more, for the good times.