F OR a few short years a group of hurlers wore the Dublin shirt with requisite honour and distinction to lay a few bogeys, win a few friends, even influence a few people. They were guided by a legendary force of nature, Lar Foley, an uncompromising personality for whom Dublin hurling abandoned its chains and temporarily joined the free world.

They didn't win anything of lasting significance but they were a key player in the plotline of Leinster's hurling narrative around the turn of the 1990s. The GAA hadn't fully embraced the modern communications age in a country then under the spell of Jack Charlton's team. The capital's hurlers passed through almost unnoticed.

Yet they came close, the width of a post, to winning a first provincial title since Foley's own playing days in 1961 when, in their second straight provincial final appearance in 1991, they lost by two points to Kilkenny. They put Offaly on the floor in the semi-final, denying the Faithful a 12th consecutive Leinster final appearance. And they reached league semi-finals in 1989 and '90, beating every team in the country.

One more quality player might have made the difference. Most had been hurling a while when Foley arrived, some had stopped, and they were too ripe for a prolonged stay in the limelight. Foley launched a small revolution that enlivened a couple of summers and league campaigns before their resources were exhausted and they called a ceasefire.

Being the last Dublin hurling team to reach a Leinster final, 18 years ago, set them apart, and connects them to the present hopefuls. Twelve months earlier in 1990 they reached the county's first Leinster senior hurling final in 26 years by beating Wexford. Despite all the usual obstacles, they made genuine progress. Sean Shanley and Mick Kennedy, the team selectors, met Foley to talk about where they wanted to go with the team.

"They (Dublin) were in the doldrums, they had been in Division 2 for a while," recalls Shanley. "In my opinion, new managers were coming in and picking good minors who would be there for two or three years and then left aside, and then more young fellas would come in; it seemed they never let them mature. First meeting we had was about what we wanted to do, was it a plan for three or five years or something immediate and we decided we needed to do something immediate. So we brought some players back. Vinny Holden, Jim Lyng, even Sean Kearns, older fellas who had been discarded you could say. They were the best players in Dublin at the time. We went for our first (league) game against Westmeath in Kinnegad and thankfully we never looked back."

In Division 2 they won their four pre-Christmas games, but faced stiffer opposition in the new year. At Croke Park in quick succession they defeated Clare and Cork and won promotion. Liam Moggins had been brought in to handle the physical preparation and they used Belcamp College in Malahide as a training base. Weights training and running on sand dunes hardened them. "They were able to stand up to the country lads, they weren't intimidated by them," says Shanley. "I reckoned Dublin always had skillful hurlers but they didn't have the physique, I reckon these (the current crop) are a different bunch.

"Dublin hurling wasn't going anywhere, football was all the rage. We were the poor relation and Lar had a great saying that you had to earn respect. He said if we wanted what the footballers got, we had to earn it. When we did, we got the very same conditions as the footballers. He had great friends and the goodwill we got from business people, we got invited to places. From hurling men that mightn't be Dublin men but who would like to see it (hurling) doing well."

Foley, a member of the last Dublin team to win a Leinster senior title in 1961, a two-time All-Ireland senior football medallist, and eternal St Vincent's legend, was a formidable character, a huge man who earned his living as a farmer on the family farm in Kinsealy in north Dublin. He used colourful language and hurried to the point. Some see comparisons between him and the current Dublin hurling manager in terms of the relationship being established.

"Fellas would go that extra mile for him," says Shanley. "He was a man's man. He didn't put up with any nonsense, fellas getting hurt. He had never heard of hamstrings and groin strains. He didn't like fellas coming moaning with things like that. Fellas learned very quickly. You couldn't complain to Lar. If you are there, you train and that is that."

A commanding figure? "That is a nice way of putting (laughs). There were fellas walking out because of abuse he was after giving them and I would have to play 'good cop' and say to them that he was only messing. You didn't shirk anything in the tackle, he had no time for anyone who would draw back, you had to keep going, there were fellas dropped from the panel for that."

Having earned promotion in the spring of 1989, they then went and beat Division 1 team Limerick in the league quarter-finals before Galway stalled their progress. In the championship, they crashed to Laois at Tullamore. Undeterred, Dublin returned to the league in October, facing reigning All-Ireland champions Tipperary at Croke Park. They won by a point, scoring 1-3 without reply in the final quarter before an attendance of just 3,884. Dublin were 0-2 to 1-6 down at the interval -- comebacks became a familiar feature of Foley's teams. They rarely gave up the fight. In the next round, they beat Galway 2-16 to 1-15 at Pearse Stadium, having been 0-3 to 1-13 adrift early in the second half.

Shanley recalls current Dublin hurler David Treacy's father, John, outside the dressing room in Salthill afterwards, standing theatrically on a pile of gravel, aping Foley. "He stood on this pile of gravel," says Shanley, "and proclaimed: 'Whose dunghill are we going to crow on next?' 'We will crow on their dunghill', Lar would often say about a team we'd be about to play. 'Whose dunghill is next?'"

As it happened, it was Kilkenny's. Kilkenny County Board had decided to fix one of their home league ties in Callan. Dublin got pawned off. Around 5,000 were present and Dubs fans outnumbered by an estimated six-to-one. By the end, they were the more vocal after the visitors won 1-9 to 0-11. It was November hurling, granted, but you didn't beat Kilkenny too handy or too often and they rejoiced.

Kilkenny men hurled on both teams. Jim Lyng, then hurling with Faughs, was in the Dublin defence, while another former Kilkenny hurler, the late MJ Ryan, lined out in the forwards. Richie Reid, who won an All-Ireland in 1979, also hurled under Foley. Today's match would have provided a perfect meeting place to reminisce but the group has lost both Foley, in 2003, and MJ Ryan whose death at 47 last February shocked the hurling community. In Callan that wintry day in 1989, Kevin Fennelly, who would later manage Dublin, tended goal and future Dublin forward Eamonn Morrissey also started. After half-time Kilkenny reeled off six points without reply to lead by two but Dublin finished the stronger.

Their All-Star of that period, Brian McMahon, has fond memories of that match. "To beat them down there in the muck and rain and the team they had out, it was like saying: this gang of jackeens are not that bad. We sang all the way home, on the bus, got as far as Naas and the bus broke down. At the courthouse. We went straight to the pub and sang there as well."

Dublin hurling buses were sometimes prone to mood swings, breakdowns. "We went to play in Wexford Park," McMahon goes on, "and we had a bus on the way back which cut out when it came to a halt so it had to stay moving. So lads had gone for a few lemonades after and anyone who wanted to get off the bus on the way home to go to the toilet had to jump off while it was still moving, and then jump back on again. They'd be running up the road trying to catch it."

The perfect sequence of wins was completed when they added Cork to the scalps of Kilkenny, Galway and Tipp in their final league game of 1989 at Croke Park. Again they showed resilience and faith. At one point they were 0-3 to 2-6 behind and came back to win by two, outscoring Cork 2-5 to 0-2 after the interval in front of a crowd of over 7,000. People were beginning to take notice. Taking them seriously.

In the early months of 1990, their league form turned sour. Limerick handed them a nine-point beating, although Lyng and Ryan were absent, and despite another comeback against Wexford, they lost the next tie as well, before defeating Antrim in the last round. They met Waterford in the quarter-final, the Division 2 runners-up, and won and then Kilkenny again in the last four. In early April they were no match for the black and amber who won 2-16 to 1-9. An attendance of 25,500 saw the first of two semi-finals on the card and Eamonn Morrissey scored a goal after eight minutes to set them on their way, and another in the second half, ending up with 2-2.

The championship brought a devastating defeat for Kilkenny, the league champions, when they were routed by Offaly, 4-15 to 1-8. In the other semi-final at Croke Park, Dublin confirmed their growing status by beating Wexford 2-16 to 1-17 but Offaly won by five points in the decider, and much more emphatically than the scoreline conveyed. Their two goals came in injury-time. A crowd of 20,383 watched Dublin's first Leinster final appearance since 1964, nothing like the crowds following the football team.

Kilkenny got up off the ground and brought in Ollie Walsh as manager. Their opening league match in the autumn of 1990 was against Dublin at Nowlan Park and Foley said his hurlers were going there to win and "not feeling inferior like Dublin teams of the past".

But the home team prevailed with three goals to spare. Dublin went on to have their worst league under Foley and lost every match, finally relegated in a defeat to Clare after a last-minute goal the following February before just 1,793 onlookers at Croke Park. Playing left corner-back for Clare that day was Anthony Daly.

They made changes for the championship, remoulding the defensive spine and midfield. A shock win over Offaly sent them into another decider, a poor match, with only one score in the opening 19 minutes courtesy of Ryan. Even though Dublin contained DJ Carey, limiting him to one point, and Ryan hit the post late, they surrendered by two in front of an attendance of 41,215. "We are still losing," Foley said afterwards. "It doesn't matter if we are losing by a point, a goal or ten points. Winning is winning. Losing is losing. It isn't about getting nearer. Our hurling has improved though." The captain John Twomey said they still hadn't won a trophy. "That's what matters at the end of the day."

They never recovered. Kilkenny went on to win the 1992 and '93 All-Irelands and Dublin were tripped up by Wexford both summers. After the '93 defeat, Lar Foley left the job. His sudden death in 2003 and that of Ryan last February robbed the group of two of the major personalities. "I was only looking at a programme from the recent (Dublin v) Wexford match and saw him (MJ) in the photo sitting bedside me and said 'holy Jesus'. You'd have MJ mainly in round centre-forward, he'd run through a wall for you," says McMahon. "The amount of physical abuse he took to give us ball."

Foley, too, is often in McMahon's thoughts. "He changed the game for me. Changed my way of hurling and complete attitude, as well as the others (selectors). He grabbed us by the scruff of the neck and said 'you have two arms, you have two legs, these lads beside you might be two foot taller and two stone heavier but they are not better than you'. Some lads were not good on their left and told to kick it because they could kick it further -- they had everything covered. We were mentally right and physically fit and brushed up on our skills, lads cut down on the beer and said we would give it a go. And we beat all the big guns. They were saying 'jayz we can't send out a second string anymore'."

After McMahon won an All-Star in 1990, his form dipped and Foley wired into him. "I probably thought I was the best thing since sliced bread and got ripped to shreds. I brought the All-Star trophy to training one night and went over to him and said 'here, you can keep that until you think I am good enough to take it back 'cos I don't want the thing'. He took it and months and months went by and I got a tap on the shoulder one night and he said 'I have a yoke in my house behind the couch whenever you feel ready . . '."

The current Dublin selector, and player under Foley, Ciaran Hetherton, spoke in 2006 of Foley's presence and how he would motivate teams. "And it wasn't through fear, he didn't bully anybody, he just laid it on the line, what he wanted."

Shanley remembers Foley finding it hard to stomach lads missing training. "He couldn't put up with any domestic excuses, like things with the missus -- he often said, if someone had a sad story, whether it was a psychologist or a nursemaid they wanted and he'd say 'Shanley, you deal with them'. He had a great saying, and players would ask me was it true: 'My mother is 93 and she would move faster than some of ye'. Yeah, he had the fear of God in some of them alright".

Eamonn Clancy was part of Foley's squad and hurled for St Vincents. "He put structure into it. He worked on coaching. Ground hurling. High snigging and low snigging which we hadn't done since I was in school. Lar? Oh, a lunatic. He was very forward." He remembers the "big farmer's hands" prodding his chest and the quivering lips. "Are you up for it, he might ask. You wouldn't say, 'no Lar'. No matter what it was!"

Clancy reckons not beating Kilkenny in 1991 wounded Foley deeply. Looking back they all realise how close they came to making the breakthrough. In the years that followed, the group dissolved and the magic faded. Clare and Wexford made historic and fairytale leaps and they returned to a life of servitude. "To my mind," says Shanley, "they (today's representatives) are a better all-round team but it's just Kilkenny are so good. But this is a team for the future whereas we were a team for then. This lot I believe will win a Leinster title in the next four years. Maybe it will be on Sunday -- who knows."

Dublin v Kilkenny

TV3, 4.0

- Dermot Crowe