A piping July day on the grass just off Ailesbury Road. An alabaster groundsman stripped to the waist, heaving hose piping around the main pitch at Old Belvedere, his tractor parked on the 22 and rattling away like a washing machine full of studs.

Even the architecturally depressed clubhouse, today bathed in sharp summer light, manages a bright spirit.

Anglesea Road in winter can assume a cadaverous complexion. The soaked concrete terracing and the rain slanting across the floodlight beams like shards of glass is a more familiar picture of winter rugby.

Here today though, the talk and images in Leinster are of renewal and strong green shoots. The breeze is optimistic, full of what-might-be. In Leinster these days there is no looking back. The anxiety and dissolution of last season's campaign and subsequent exodus of players and of coach Declan Kidney is still a little raw, the wounds still open.

Across on the back pitch blue shirts kick around a ball, the hoots and effortless, knock-about profanities suggesting this is more off-peak pleasure activity than devotion to boot technique. Kicking today for the boyish love of it, the first phase of Leinster's hard labour has been completed.

Physically, the players have acknowledged it has been the toughest pre-season Leinster have ever undertaken. The tall, swarthy figure and former Randwick number eight walking down the clubhouse side of the pitch, Michael Cheika, is responsible for the flogging.

"We've been training them very hard physically. That's with an objective to try and control tempo, to play controlled games at our own tempo," he says.

"Yeah, they've said it has been harder than any other pre-season. Maybe, though, it's just longer."

Cheika slipped in under the radar to the Leinster set-up five weeks ago while Irish rugby was immersed in Japan and New Zealand and Clive Woodward's name as a rugby oracle was turning to dust faster than a vampire hit by the first rays of dawn .

In so far as Kidney left noisily last spring, so Cheika soft-shoe shuffled into Donnybrook under cover fire from the All Blacks and their strafing of the Lions. Between the disconsolate international players who were part of the failed New Zealand mission and the players whose club-mates were cut loose or felt they had to leave, there was reason to believe Cheika would need to kid-glove the players and their confidence to purge their sense of last season's disappointment.

"No," he says. "In every football season the great thing is there is a new start. Every time you lose a game you know there is another one around the corner. I don't mean to be too philosophical. If there is a hangover, I don't see any of it. The players have taken on the work ethic. No questions. Enthusiastic, yeah. Wouldn't want any more from them.

"There was an obvious connection here," he adds. "I knew Alan Gaffney very well. I knew Gary Ella. I dunno the last coach here and no, I wasn't aware at the time of what was going on at the end of the season.

"That part is something of the past. What ever happened, happened. I've seen a real hunger here. Players want to achieve. Whether that's because of the past I don't know.

"I think as a footballer if you don't want to achieve, you can't do anything. We try to bottle that approach in paying attention to detail, making sure the players are prepared enough to get them to where they want to go."

CHEIKA'S FATHER emigrated from northern Lebanon in 1950 and not long after the Cheikas settled by the beach near Sydney, an assimilated family of two brothers and a sister. Unlike a lot of European or Middle Eastern children, Michael turned to "footy", not soccer or basketball. At the beginning it was rugby league but when he left school union caught his eye. In turn he, too, caught the eye of the Australian selectors and soon he was playing for the national under-21 side.

"If I'd stayed at home and toed the line, I would have hoped to go further," he says. "But I made the decision that I wanted to live a different type of life, I suppose."

His wanderlust took him to France and Italy and his ability as a player paid the way. Castres Olympique and CASG Paris in the French League and Rugby Livorno in Italy tooled Cheika with fluent French and Italian before he returned to Randwick to captain the Super 12 side in 1999.

A friend and team-mate of former Australian winger David Campese, Cheika was mid season into his captaincy when the goose-stepping legend told him that Italian side Padova were looking for a new coach and that he thought the Randwick backrow would fit the profile.

Campese, never known for his reticence, suggested his club-mate go over and take a look.

"I did and stopped on the spot," says Cheika. "Stopped playing right there in the middle of the season. I'd always thought about playing for a long time. I was 33. But I just thought the time was right. I was happy with my time as a player, felt this was a good step forward, a good evolution. I'd never coached anyone then, not even kids.

"If I was going to coach it would be good to do it away from home, out of my comfort zone. I enjoyed it and brought Knoxy (former Australia outhalf David Knox) over to play, went back to Randwick and coached there for three years."

Along the way Cheika built himself a successful import and distribution business in the fashion industry. With offices in London, Hong Kong and Sydney his Live Fashion employs around 30 staff. Not unlike Woodward, who applied the organisational and structural skills of running his business to the development of the World Cup-winning England team, so, too, Cheika sees the similarities between the management of 30 people in an office and a squad of rugby players.

"My business experience has shown me that you have to understand all your employees and what they are doing. When you've to make a decision you make it. Sometimes that's hard," he says.

"Yeah, I'm decisive. I think I know how to make decisions and be confident in them. But I'm not saying they're always right."

Cheika will also tell you he is in Dublin coaching Leinster because he wants to do it, not that he needs to do it. That distinction alone is a declaration of strength. His life and career to date have been punctuated with taking directions that others would have found difficult.

Leaving Australia despite playing for the under-21 side and detonating a potentially elite rugby career; chucking the captaincy mid season at Randwick to coach a B-listed European club.

He is a private man and has interests and a sensibility that thrive as much away from the locker-room as in it. That is not to say the 38-year-old has a genetic disposition that allows him walk away. It seems more a confidence, a self-realisation what is important to him. He knows exactly what he wants and cares deeply that he will succeed.

"One thing I'm very committed to is achieving," he says. "People have put confidence in me to come and take up a position. I'm not going to let them down. We bring a certain skill set to the table. We work on making the small parts of the players' game better.

"Fine detail so that they can perform under pressure. Not just hope that it happens. I want to teach everyone in the squad something new. I want to make them better and I want them to do it consistently."

THAT WELL-BRED, eligible bachelor, Team Leinster. Suave, talented, occasionally reckless, with fine teeth, good hair but aching to shake off the capable-young-man cloak and become more of a patriarch, a trusted heavyweight, a big hitter, have hired a coach described as "a no-nonsense" operator.

In Knox they have the "highly innovative backs coach". A slight shrug, he stretches back against the tubed rail at the back of the terrace as if to say "what do you want me to say to that mate?"

"I wouldn't say I'm rude or arrogant. I counsel with the players. But there comes a time when you have to say this is what we're doing. I mean I don't expect anything of the players, right? Of course you play footy to win. Anyone says we don't want to win is a liar. I wanna win for sure but I'm not going to the end before I've gotten to the start. I know what I need to do to win.

"Pressure? If I think like that we're doomed. Know what I mean? I'm leading a ship here. Plan properly. Look at the opposition all the time. I don't really have expectations. I'm not big on that type of thing. I've been recruited here to achieve certain objectives. It's one thing playing an expansive game, it's another thing playing it and playing it well."

Controlled. Measured. Personalised. Building blocks. Work loads. Phases. It's easy to become a rugby geek these days. Cheika is applying his system, moulding the players in his shape and at this point blindly. He has yet to see the team play in a live competitive match but has watched all of last year's games on tape, which has given him no more than a framed, narrow perspective.

But there is enough of a nasty and pleasant mix to show him that if Team Leinster were a person, he would be taking lithium to cure a bipolar disposition.

"I need to know the personalities and the bodies, the physical possibilities of everyone. I need to know where players need help, where they are good and can give help to others. And definitely a lot more responsibility and onus."

No names are mentioned. It is too far to the starting line to peg names with numbers. He knows who 13 will be but he doesn't know when, maybe Christmas. Maybe sooner. Perhaps O'Driscoll is a fast healer. The Lions players are not back yet and they then go to Poland before he gets them. So is he is also shopping for a backrow forward.

On a three-year contract, Cheika is aware of Leinster's fractious history. Kidney, Ella, Matt Williams, Mike Ruddock - is there a book there? He gives the "well-what-do-you-want-me to say mate?" look.

He, too, is part of the refurbishment, part of the summer optimism. Convincing too. But at this stage we have lived too many Leinster crusades to have become blind believers.