Altered by Bolton from the blues

It's not everybody's idea of heaven. Cooped up on a bus for five hours then sitting around a London city centre hotel for the weekend. Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones once said a rock star's life is more about hanging around than playing music - sometimes it seems the observation could equally apply to the lives of professional footballers.

Still, as he wanders about and stretches his legs in the foyer after the long journey south, Gareth Farrelly could scarcely be happier. Around him more seasoned pros might be grumbling about the time to be killed between now and Sunday lunchtime. But for the 25year-old Dubliner, who has just arrived with the rest of the Bolton Wanderers squad in Kensington where they will base themselves ahead of tomorrow's top of the first division clash with Fulham, just being involved in the daily humdrum of first team football is enough. It's close to a year and a half since Farrelly left his painful days at Everton behind him and six months since he started to fulfil his potential with Sam Allardyce's team. His first game for the club seemed like a dream start - he scored within a matter of minutes, but five days later he received a phone call from Ireland telling him that his father had died suddenly. Injuries accounted for much of the rest of the season.

During this campaign only two players at the club have made more starts and finally there is a sense that Farrelly, who was playing Premiership and international football five years ago before disappearing into the wilderness at Goodison Park, has emerged from the sort of nightmare that every footballer dreads.

"In a way I don't even like to talk about Everton now because I see it as being in the past," he remarks before, with scarcely a moment's hesitation, recalling some of the treatment that hurt him the most after his move from Aston Villa. "It was amazing stuff really," he laughs. "Basically I had no relationship with the manager (Walter Smith) at all. I spent months training with the kids, not even at the same training ground as the first team lads and when sometimes my boots didn't arrive from where they were I'd have to wear the coach's stuff."

His routines became the stuff of bored office workers, a day-time job to be endured from Monday to Friday and weekends off. His only contact with the Premiership during that time came through a friend who worked as a players' agent. "We'd go to games together, any game where he might want to look at somebody and I'd just sit there, wondering to myself whether I could really still do it."

The way he was treated still baffles him, he insists. The obvious conclusion to be drawn at the time was that Smith wanted to get rid of him but clubs that expressed an interest were reportedly told that he wasn't for sale. "There was just no logic to it as far as I could see."

Eventually the intervention of Sam Allardyce, who had just replaced Colin Todd at the Reebok stadium, gave him the opportunity he had been longing for. The switch was an ironic one for the Dubliner who had, on the last day of the 1997-98 season, scored the goal against Coventry that had kept Everton up and sent Bolton down to Division One. "I got a bit of stick about it when I got here first but I just said to people, if it made them feel any better, to look at the good it did me - I didn't really ever play for Everton again".

Given the length of time that he had been in the shadows, Farrelly knew that, even after dropping down a division, he had to struggle to prove himself all over again. Sure enough, while injuries kept him out of a good few games, for others he simply didn't make the team. "To be honest, though, I had no complaints," he says now. "It's hard to come back from that situation where everybody starts to forget about you because you're not playing, nobody's doing anything in the papers about you and you start to worry about whether things are ever going to change.

"When I came here I knew that I had no God-given claim to a place in the team, but I knew I had a chance and that was what mattered to me. In the end, it's only really been this year that it's happened for me but, after what happened to me at Everton, there's never been a time here when I didn't realise how lucky I was."

Before he had even established himself as a regular for Bolton he got his sixth cap when he came on during the second half of Ireland's game against the USA last summer, but he insists now that he didn't really enjoy the experience of being back with the international squad.

"Don't get me wrong, playing for your country is the greatest honour you can have in the game, but I didn't really feel right on that trip. It's supposed to be something you earn and I didn't feel that I'd earned my place back in an Ireland squad; I was out there with lads who were doing it every week for their clubs and I still had a lot to prove at that stage."

Things have changed a little now but he still doesn't see much prospect of him figuring in Mick McCarthy's immediate plans. "Why should I?", he asks. "He has lads who have done very well for him and I'm happy that my priority at the moment is a club that has given me something I never had - more games this season than I'd had in eight years in England."

If the 12 remaining games of this season go well then Farrelly is hoping that his next year might be his first as a regular Premiership player. Defeat tomorrow at Craven Cottage would effectively end Bolton's already slim hopes of catching Fulham but even after recent draws with QPR, Huddersfield and Grimsby and last weekend's 4-1 home defeat by Blackburn, they hold a four-point lead over Rovers who do, however, have two games in hand.

"A lot of it will be sorted out over the next few weeks with teams playing Saturdays and midweek, but we feel we can hold on. After losing the likes of Eidur Gudjohnsen, Claus Jensen and Fishy (Mark Fish) last summer expectations for us were probably low this season but we've done well, even a few of the last five or six (games) haven't quite gone out way."

Ending the poor spell by beating the leaders away now would be quite an upset but then Farrelly, even more than most in the Wanderers camp, has gotten used to expecting the unexpected over the past few seasons.