Tom Humphries gets an earful of passion, humour and common sensefrom the former Republic of Ireland manager

A few weeks ago Eoin Hand did a favour for Brian Kerr. He went to watch Georgia play Moldova in Tbilisi. He arrived at five in the morning and there was nobody there to meet him as had been promised. Now there are two principle hotels in Tbilisi, a Marriot and a Sheraton. Thus Eoin fell for an old local scam. A man, scruffy and indigent looking, approached him and said simply "Marriot"?

Not realising the man had a 50 per cent chance of hitting the jackpot, Hand assumed that this was his contact. All was well until a few minutes later when he found himself in a creaky Lada driving through the woods with two burly men in the front seats.

"I thought, I've fallen for it. I've fallen for the big one. They are going to do me. Jaysus, how's it going to finish? Will they kill me here in the woods? In the end the scam was they wanted $50 instead of $20. I was never so happy just to be ripped off."

And he laughs. Another story. Another experience.

You find him, busy and happy, in an office in Drumcondra, a big man nestled in a small room on the street and in the house which he grew up in. His desk is developing gentle foothills of documents and correspondence and the walls are filled with photographs which testify to an extraordinary life. Beckenbauer, Pele and a galaxy of Irish team shots and family pictures. Good times and bad times spread out around him.

Within every frame there is a moment, a story, a face which trips a memory in Eoin Hand's mind. Before Brian Kerr's installation he was the last Irish-based manager, the last to speak with the Dublin accent which is the personality of the Irish game. Now he is a living link between eras, not just a connection with the cobwebbed past of Irish soccer but one of those who stayed and fought to put things right.

His turn as manager ended badly, but he is indefatigable. All that abuse which was heaped on him at the time, then the merry chug-a-lug of the Charlton era with Big Jack being precisely as lucky as Hand was unlucky - well, it all condemned him to some stark gulag of national memory, left him for a while with the impression that it was Eoin Hand against the world.

People who didn't remember the Eoin Hand days announced that they didn't want to go back to the Eoin Hand days, as if those times were the highwatermark of incompetence and blundering. A friend told him way back then that silence and time would be his allies in recovery.

He can laugh now. Listen, he's been through it all a thousand times in his head. He has no agendas, no scores to settle. He was 34 when he got the job, 39 when he ceased to be Irish manager. Too young.

He tells a story about the end of his time in charge. Russia were playing Denmark in Moscow. He needed to scout the game, so he arrived in Moscow on the afternoon of the match, travelling light, just the suit he stood in and an overnight reservation for a hotel.

He emerged from the airport and shoehorned himself into the creakiest Lada in Moscow. And then he felt it, the spring under his backside, the rusty old spring upon which he was virtually impaled. By the time the Lada got him to his hotel his trousers were no longer affording him any cover or modesty.

"So there I was, the Irish team manager, in Moscow with no backside in my trousers. I had to go along to the Danes and ask them for tracksuit bottoms so that I could go and scout them. Ah the glamour, the glamour."

True to his character, he is good- humoured about it all, but the story is symbolic of the times, the idea of an Irish manager alone, unmet and without a seat in his pants tells something of the environment Eoin Hand stepped into.

Under John Giles, an Irish team Hand played in had to travel from Poznan to Berlin in the baggage carriage of a train. Late in Hand's reign he asked the FAI to bring a chef and their own food on a trip to Moscow. The FAI declined. Finally, after much cajoling, they agreed to bring food but not a chef. Hand decided to bring his wife along to do the cooking. In Moscow the official who had nixed the notion of bringing a chef took her aside and asked her to say nothing but to make sure he was given a fine breakfast every morning.

Money wasn't an issue. When he started, they offered £12,500 per annum and he said fine. Giles, his predecessor, he thinks was on £10,000. Money wasn't an issue for either of them. It was an honour. Hand finished on a wage of £17,500, still happy.

It amuses him now. He remembers as Irish manager booking airfares a month in advance to save the FAI money, and when the Saturday came the blazers would be jumping on first class to go and see the same match. Hand would go down the country to say a few words at his own expense. He'd stay with friends. When he wanted to go to the European Championships at the start of his reign the FAI couldn't see the point and declined to accredit him.

For all that, he was unlucky and his team played decent football. For the 1982 World Cup campaign they came out of the hat with Holland, Belgium and France. Famously, Hand's team were robbed in Brussels, with Frank Stapleton's 19th-minute goal disallowed for reasons which are still not apparent. Late on the Portuguese referee decided that Steve Heighway had fouled the Belgian Gerets. Nobody knew why. From the free Ceulemans scored.

Ireland finished the group on 10 points, denied a place in Mexico by the goal difference of a single score. France went through and got to the semi-final and that storied game against Germany. England qualified for Mexico in another group with just eight points. Northern Ireland went through on seven points.

It was an exciting, passionate time, a turbulent few years. Hand's anger that night in Brussels when he called the Portuguese referee Nazare a cheat and a liar, the talents of Stapleton, Brady, Lawrenson and Daly set against a clutch of more prosaic players. Harsh draws, cruel dismissals and goals disallowed for reasons which still beggar belief robbed Hand's team of the reward they deserved. And in the end he was pilloried and ridiculed. He remembers the tyres on his son's bike being slashed a few times, remembers looking at his family and wondering what effect it was all having on them.

His Torquemada was somebody he had grown up with in Drumcondra, Eamon Dunphy. Week in, week out, Eoin Hand was roasted on a spit. Perhaps the worst thing was the inevitability. He knew it was coming.

"Dunphy had told me he would do that. We played a charity game one afternoon in Parnell Park and we were in Quinn's of Drumcondra afterwards, and Dunphy and I - we'd grown up together, played football since we were nine or 10 - and this bit of needle started. I was opening a sports shop in Dublin at the time, I had been down in Limerick before that. He started in about how I was really sniffing about for the Shamrock Rovers job, that the sports shop was a ruse. I got mad. He got under my skin. I got stuck in to him about him being useless when he was on the management side of the fence. I had come back to Rovers with Giles and Treacy in the 1970s and saw him coach. I saw his contribution."

He's over it though. So much life lived since then, he's too passionate a guy to let himself be eaten away by the past. Today he is Career Guidance Officer for the FAI, a schoolmasterish title which gives no hint of the variety of issues and cases he has been busy with.

To the feudal world of footballing apprenticeships he has brought his passion and experience. He speaks to parents, he examines contracts, he helps youngsters, he advises clubs, he has established courses for players returning from England and is establishing an academic career path for League of Ireland players. He is abreast of every relevant development in UEFA and FIFA, constantly on the phone ensuring that Irish players and Irish clubs get the treatment they deserve.

He fishes a file up from his desk. Here's a kid, don't name him or the club, but here's a kid and they came for him and took him over to England at 15. The FIFA rule is that nobody goes till they're 16, but this club are worried that by then somebody else will have spotted his talent, so they bring him across at 15.

The FAI refused international clearance for the move, so the English club went to their local authority's educational board and got them to issue a licence which overruled the school leaving age in England, enabling (so they thought) the kid to play for them while he is under 16.

Hand is incredulous. He produces a letter from the files. UEFA backing him to the hilt.

"They'll throw the whole registration out the window. It's ridiculous. Annoying. A year of the kid's life gone."

It never ceases to amaze him, this vulnerability matched up against the game's cynicism. Not too long ago there was another case. A guy selling trials to kids for 450 quid a time.

"The guy would round up four or five boys, then ring up a Nationwide club in England, some relatively obscure club, and announce that he had some good 'uns for them, would they take a look? They were decent enough players and the club said yeah, we'll throw them into this youth match or whatever. So he brings them over in a Hiace van. The club concerned have a hostel. He puts three of the boys in the hostel and went off to a hotel and booked one room alone with the other kid. The club reported him to me. I passed it on and there was an investigation. All clubs in England were made aware of this guy's identity."

Himself, he was seventeen-and-a-half when he went. He finished his Leaving Cert in O'Connell's with an honour in Irish but a head that was otherwise crammed with football. He'd been a winger for Stella Maris but not in great demand for trials.

Then one day, not long before the Leaving, he was picked for a trial in Santry. He scored four goals in front of a scout from Swindon in a 4-4 draw. Eoin and John Givens, brother of Don, went across. Swindon offered Eoin Hand a year's contract and placed John Givens gently back into the pond.

"John was a lovely player but he didn't have pace. I still slag him about that."

He had a year at Swindon. The senior team had Mike Summerbee and Ernie Hunt and all those louche glamourboys, and Eoin Hand was on eight quid, a fiver of which was taken back for his digs, then another quid for stoppages. Two quid to live on. King of the world.

He scarcely noticed Swindon sliding from the second division to the third and was a little surprised when they said sorry son, you aren't needed anymore.

He came back dispirited. Wiser if not richer. He played for Dundalk until his hamstring went. Life without football beckoned until his local side, Drumcondra, crooked a finger.

Fate! One day all their centre halves got injured and he was asked would he play at the back. Suddenly it all made sense. He could see the whole game in front of him. He blossomed. Things happened.

"I was working down in the fruit markets as a clerk at the time. I remember at one stage Drums saying to me that they wanted to make me the best-paid player in the league. £4 a week! I asked around and everyone else seemed to be getting a fiver. "

In 1968, Portsmouth came in and offered eight grand for him. He was a hard nut by now.

"I went to Drums and asked how much am I going for. They wouldn't say. Eventually I found out it was eight grand. I told them I'll only go if you give me two grand. I should have said to Portsmouth that there would be a signing on fee, but I was young."

That's the problem, they are all young and wide-eyed.

Last week he was at Lilleshall for the grim spectacle of the Exit Trials, an annual ritual wherein the kids who are let go by Premiership clubs get a last glancing shot at the big time playing a trials game in front of the scouts or managers from Nationwide clubs.

They did well, the handful of Irish players he came in contact with. In all there were 81 kids there. The Irish contingent included Chris McGrath (son of Paul) from Liverpool. Stephen Gahan, Dave Sullivan, Michael Ward, Gerard Breen, Anthony Martin. Kids who all their lives have been making it, kids who have been encouraged, praised, lauded and pampered. One day they get called in and sandbagged. It's all over.

He could see the trouble in their eyes, the uncertainty. At least he had something to offer them. He'll be making phone calls on their behalf, offering courses, re-introductions, advising on their PFA rights. He is the human safety net.

When Eoin Hand fell off the rope, after a 20-cap career and 11 years at Portsmouth and five years as Irish manager, he decided that life was just beginning. There is a nice little movie to be made out of his adventures since then.

Take Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s. You think that train to Berlin was bad? His number four and his number 11 were having an affair. His little forward was never as good in matches as he was in training. Inquiries revealed that he was going into the desert on a Friday night with some friends and masturbating till dawn. Another day a player scored a near-perfect goal for him after 10 minutes and took himself off the field immediately on the grounds that the goal was as good as it could get. Somewhere in Saudi there's still a Mercedes car which Eoin Hand owns but wasn't allowed remove from the country.

Onwards in football. He managed Huddersfield Town in the early 1990s. An eye-opening time. People hustling for bungs as the game went cash crazy, everyone on the make. He can tell you the names. Still makes him shudder when he thinks of them dealing with Irish kids, buying and selling them with a twist on the side.

When Huddersfield finished his marriage collapsed under the strain of being out of a job, and impetuously, almost, he headed for South Africa, still chasing the obsession.

He'd been there before for footballing summers in the 1970s. Nobody every told him not to go. Football was a black world as far as he was concerned and his education came slowly. In 1976, he fell out with Ian St John, the new Portsmouth manager, and went to South Africa to play for a side called Arcadia Shepherds.

"One of our best players was a guy called Vincent Julius from Soweto. The end-of- season dinner dance came around and Saul Sachs, our chairman, came to me just to let me know Vincent could go to the dinner, but when the dancing started he would had to leave. I thought at first he was joking. He wasn't, so a few of us went and had a night in town with Vincent instead and that was the end of that with Arcadia."

Now he was back in Africa. Living in Durban, in charge of Amazulu. The season hadn't started. He was two months into a two-year contract. Things took a turn for the worst.

The players would come to him and say Mr Eoin, are you worried the supporters do not like you? It didn't worry him any more than the witchdoctor did. The witchdoctor employed mutti on behalf of the team.

"I'd come in and they'd be burning things in the corner of the dressing-room, and I'd say out of curiosity, 'What are you burning?', but they'd never say. If they thought that the other team's mutti was more powerful than our mutti nothing I'd say could make a difference."

One day on the training pitch a large portion of fans approached him with a message.

"We want you to leave. If you don't go we will kill you." He explained what he was here for, the potential that there was in the club. They were insistent.

"You must go."

He began explaining that he was a professional, with a contract, here to do a job. A large, very large, man stepped out from among the crowd.

"You are not listening," he said very slowly. "If you do not go we will kill you tomorrow."

"Ah. Okay. Point taken." And Eoin Hand looked around. His players had disappeared.

He went to see his bosses next day. "I've been told if I come back they'll kill me."

They paid him three months wages and said goodbye to him. He asked for more of the money he should have earned but he wasn't exactly holding any aces.

"It struck home a day later. I was staying in a nice hotel with a pool up the top, on the roof. I was up there by the pool on my own reading the paper when a black guy comes in and walks pastme and shows me a gun. He takes it out and looks at it and starts clicking. I'm getting the message. I'd had to change rooms once because of threats over the phone. So I gathered my things, got into the lift - and he steps in with me. Sweat all the way down. So I said to him, like I'm making small talk, 'I'm leaving now', I said, 'I'm leaving Durban today'. He just nodded. That was their little goodbye message. To this day I look out for them and their results. They're still struggling."

Things were spiralling now. He went up to Johannesburg and opened a sports/Irish bar with a guy he met. After a short while Hand started to get suspicious. He asked questions.

"So one Friday I'm looking after the bar, talking to some Dublin guys who were in, and we had my jerseys up on the wall and Irish music and it was a nice day, and this Chinese woman walks in. Straight up to me. Can I use your toilet? Ten seconds later a big white guy comes in. 'What were you just doing with my lady?' I knew straight away it was a set-up. I turned to the Dublin lads.

'Don't give me that. Lads? You saw what happened a few seconds ago. Lads, you saw there was no problem?'

"But he took a bottle and smashed it down on me. Took the glasses right off and broke the lower half of my eye socket. Then he hit me again. I was unconscious. The Dublin guys just ran out. I was out in hospital for three weeks, out of the way for six weeks. When I came back I looked at the books. Bad news. I went to the bank, got what I had, came in at five in the morning, took all me shirts down and said right, that's it. Walked away."

Back in Dublin life was miserable. No relationships. Pining. Bored. He began drinking heavily. Stopped eating altogether. Life was what he did between going to the pub. He remembers when he started to get ill the nurse in the hospital speaking to him about drink. What did he have yesterday? As it happened the day before had been quite full as it was a Sunday and there were matches and stuff on. He'd divided the day into three and visited the pub in between. Fourteen or 15 pints he'd had.

How often would you do that? Every day. Sometimes more.

Eventually he was diagnosed with pancreatitis, an ailment which brought him to death's door. He was administered the last rites and prepared to die. That he pulled through is testament to his resilience and spirit.

All that is what he pours into the job every day now. All those stories, all those hurts, all those triumphs and defeats. He has his passion and his zest for life back. He no longer drinks or smokes.

He sees parents coming through his door and they want to know what's ahead for their darling son. He gives them the good, the bad and the ugly. He enjoys watching them. Mothers are careful and pragmatic. Fathers burst with reflected ego. And when it doesn't come true, when the fairy-tale ends a few reels short of a happy ending, it's mothers picking up the pieces. Daddy doesn't want to know. Sad.

He tells them that life is an adventure, though. There's a lot wrong with the system, but there's nothing wrong with lads going across and having a go. It's an opportunity if they go with the right frame of mind. Worst scenario? They can come back and say they had a go. They have the experience in the bank. They went through a lot.

He's working on issues now which will effect Irish soccer for a long time. Compensation and solidarity payments. Accreditation for scouts. An Irish academy. His head teems with ideas.

Looking back, he feels he got the Irish job too young perhaps, but you know there are no regrets. Again and again he says it, I'm the luckiest guy alive.

And he's telling you now about the house he built in Kerry, about the stream and the summer evenings and how he likes to study the linnets and the finches and the swans, and you can see it in his face how his own appetite and enthusiasms must minister the battered spirits of those who pass under his influence.