Conor Glass says he always certain that an All-Ireland Senior Club Football Final would one day arrive for him and his Glen team-mates.

Perhaps his sojourn Down Under saw him develop a bit of single-minded Aussie brashness as well a passion for cafe culture.

"I knew we were going to get to that level at some stage," the 2022 Football All-Star told BBC Sport Northern Ireland.

"I knew the personnel we had around me and what we had achieved through underage and schools football. I always knew in the back of my mind that we were up there with the best teams in Ireland - albeit we had to get through Derry and Ulster first.

"That's just the sort of personality I have and I know what I want to achieve. Probably the older players and even past players at the club, if you had that sentence put to them, they would give a very different reaction to me."

But while Glen are facing into Sunday's All-Ireland decider against a Kilmacud Crokes side who will include Galway star Shane Walsh and possibly a fit-again Paul Mannion, Glass admits he didn't necessarily expect that the Watty Grahams appearance in the Croke Park showpiece would come quite so soon.

And the same goes for Derry's first Ulster title in 24 years last summer.

"Look, I knew Glen had the players and Derry had the players but did I think we were going to do it inside a year? Probably not and that's come down to having the personnel around me."

After coming home in the autumn of 2020, within 12 months Glass was helping Glen end their inexplicable failure to ever land a Derry title and 2022 saw his club retain the John McLaughlin Cup a few months after the midfielder's Anglo-Celt Cup success with the Oak Leafers.

Glass, in a very understated way, does believe the good habits developed by his time with Hawthorn in the Australian Football League has rubbed off on his club and county team-mates.

"Yes I brought home probably a professional aspect into the team(s) but if I didn't have the players around me in Glen and Derry and also the coaching, plus my family and friends...it's a combination of factors."

With Walsh added to the Kilmacud squad that suffered an agonising extra-time defeat by Kilcoo in last year's final, after looking in control for much of the contest, and Mannion possibly also back after not featuring 12 month ago, the 1995 and 2009 champions look certain to go into the decider as favourites - even though they didn't look particularly impressive in their semi-final victory over Kerins O'Rahillys.

"Kilmacud have been an outstanding club for the last 10 or 15 years and have been to this sort of position before and obviously last year they ran Kilcoo close and they have different personnel in their team now," adds Glass.

"Yes we'll try and tame their best players and them offensively. We have a job to do and we fully think our game plan will stand up.

"You've got to be confident going into games. If you go in thinking, 'what if? Or 'I don't want to lose', that's when you can get clipped.

"We have full confidence in ourselves. We'll try and tame their main influences and their main threats and we'll back ourselves."

Having the cafe along with business partner and girlfriend Niamh means Conor can seemingly forget about a quiet build-up to Sunday's decider, with Rory Gallagher's decision to hand him the Derry captaincy also having been announced over the past week.

"With the buzz around the town and people coming in just to chat about football, I'm in a serious position and I'm looking forward to what the next days hold in terms of the actually build-up to the game itself and seeing what we can do for this community."

In addition to running the cafe and his football commitments with club and county, Glass is also somehow finding time to continue the accountancy studies which he began after returning from Australia.

"Me and Niamh have chatted about it, what we have achieved over the last year and it really has come down that we haven't had time to think about it.

"We just kind of roll with the punches and just move from one thing to the next. And yeah, it's been working so far."