"It may not have been the best moment of the year," says Noel O'Reilly, as he casts an eye back over the most eventful 12 months of his coaching career, "but standing on the pitch in Cyprus after the under-18s had won our last group match, when we didn't know whether Croatia had beaten England to put us in the final, that was an amazing experience.

"The mix of emotions, the high of winning, but the nervousness - we thought the Croatians were good enough to win and they'd been in front the last we'd heard, but we weren't quite sure whether we were in the final or not. That's something I think I'll remember for a long, long time."

The Dubliner, in fact, has quite a few high points to reflect upon since last Christmas. As Brian Kerr's assistant with the under-age national teams, he was centrally involved with the teams that won European Championships in Scotland and Cyprus, as well as invitation tournaments in Portugal and Iceland.

As Pat Dolan's number two at St Patrick's Athletic he was there to see the club regain the championship on a night of drama in Kilkenny. And there was even a taste of success for Belvedere Boys under-18s, a team he had also helped out. "They hadn't won anything really, which was unusual for a team at the club, so when they beat Stella Maris to win the Leinster Youth Cup it was nice for them."

O'Reilly's role in so many success stories hasn't gone unnoticed. After the Ireland Under-20 side finished third in Malaysia in '97, he continued to maintain a low profile, with some help from the FAI who didn't even invite him to their annual Opel-sponsored awards shindig at the Burlington.

This year he was singled out for particular recognition by the association who gave him a Special Merit Award. More importantly, they also gave him a chance to do full-time what he had long been doing just about all of the time.

"They said to me that night that it must be nice to be become a full-time coach and I said `well, I've been full-time for years, the only difference now is that I'm going to get paid for it'."

O'Reilly had for more than two decades relied on the goodwill of his employers at St Joseph's School for the Visually Impaired on Dublin's northside in order that he could fulfil his enormous commitments to St Patrick's Athletic and, to a lesser extent, Belvedere Boys.

"It was a mad, mad, mad schedule," he says, "but I got a lot of support from everybody around me and I suppose I kept doing it because I loved it. Even now I seem to be on the go all the time." As we talk, he is preparing to leave for a coaching seminar in Skerries, one of a series he is doing around the country in the build up to Christmas. "Between seminars, coaching sessions and watching games, I like the feeling of being involved, of learning something new and passing it on.

"There's an advantage, too, to being the coach rather than the manager in that the manager is out there for the game and if things are going wrong it's so hard to do anything, but at training you're completely in control and it gives you a great feeling when things go well and you see fellas coming on."

This past year there have been plenty of occasions when he and Kerr could feel justifiably proud of the way they brought their players on. From their initial success in the annual under-18 tournament in Oporto, they seemed endlessly capable of topping one achievement with a greater one and the victory over Germany in the Under-18 European final in July assured the pair and their teams a place in the UEFA history books for no other country had previously completed the double.

"That was great to be involved with," he says, as he remembers the victory celebrations, "but then it's always great to be there for any sort of win. I mean, when we went to Iceland for the Nordic Cup, we reckoned we'd done it all and there was nothing left for us to prove, so we could go over there and sort of take it easy, give all of the lads a run out. Then we started looking around at the other teams and suddenly Brian and myself were saying each other, `hold on a minute here, we could win this thing, too'. After going there not really minding too much how it went we ended up winning another tournament that meant an awful lot to all the players that were involved in it. Every one of them will have taken something out of that trip that will stand to them in their careers."

And so, he hopes will the players that follow them. This coming year O'Reilly will bring our most promising young stars to championships in Israel, South Africa, Nigeria and Portugal. If things go to plan, there may also be outings in the Czech Republic, Sweden and New Zealand. "We might never win another trophy but I'll tell you, if we don't, it won't be for the lack of trying."