FAI Cup/Emmet Malone talks to one of Dundalk's growing band of local favourites.

Three days after Dundalk's relegation from the Premier Division was confirmed, manager Martin Murray and his squad were back training last night; everyone doing their best to pick themselves up after last Sunday on which they came so close to hauling themselves back from the brink.

The task now, they know, is to forget the losing battle they fought to stay up and concentrate on Sunday's Carlsberg FAI Cup final at Tolka Park instead.

If the bookies are right then their chances are little better this time around but then their form hasn't been half bad of late and they take encouragement from Bray Wanderers famous victory over Finn Harps in the 1999 final.

While others in the side try to lift themselves for the weekend, one of the team's growing band of local youngsters admits with just a hint of embarrassment that he's actually feeling rather good despite last week's disappointment.

David Hoey, though, still revels in the fact that after an illness that might have ended his National League career, he has come through a tough season in which he has missed just three games.

It's a little over three years now since Hoey came down with a viral infection that caused his liver to take an unscheduled, and for a while undetected, break from normal duties.

For weeks people told him that he wasn't looking himself but it was in the middle of a game against Shelbourne, when a ball whizzed past his face and he suddenly found himself struggling to register what was going on, that the extent of the problem became apparent.

By that point all of his internal organs had been poisoned and there was talk for a while that he might need a transplant. Finally the doctors settled for sending the then 19-year-old to bed for a year. It would be as long again before he started to believe that he was back to something approaching his best.

"I played a good bit last year," he says, "but there were still a few knock-on effects and it's only really this season that I've felt completely over it.

"I think I still get a slightly easier ride from the fans because of it all; my girlfriend will be in the stand when I'm having a bad game and someone will be saying cos I'm a local that, 'ah, sure he was sick for a year', but I don't want that anymore. I feel good these days, even after everything that's happened here in the last few weeks."

Not that the relegation hasn't hurt the 23-year-old who still recalls cycling with his friend the six miles to Oriel Park from Knockbridge.

"Even in the lashing rain we'd do it," he laughs, "we loved it." And to hear him talk now it's clear that little has changed.

Back then, though, Tom McNulty was the only player who was living in the town.

"Last Sunday there were eight of us," he says "and if it came to it we could easily play next season in the first division with a totally local team.

"The lads from outside the town have been great but I think that's a measure of the progress the club has made.

"I could name 11 fellas off the top of my head who could play in the side if that was the way we were to go in the First Division."

The prospect, he readily concedes, is far from being all that unrealistic.

The fiscal realities of first division football are likely to mean cuts during the close season and there have already been rumours about some of the bigger earners either leaving or being let go.

Hoey, whose versatility has been recognised as a major asset since Jim McLaughlin told him with a grin while he was still just 18 that "I was the first person in his team but the last to get a position," could end up being a target himself.

Out of contract after this weekend's game his first concern is that Dundalk feel that he has done well enough this season at right back and, more recently, wide on the right of midfield to offer him a new deal.

After that he sounds like a man who simply can't lose as he discusses the possibilities of more Premier Division football or continuing to play for the club he has always supported and played with for more than a decade.

Of most immediate importance, however, is the final itself when he and his team mates will be looking to surprise Bohemians, just as they sent Shamrock Rovers home with their tails between their legs last month.

"Bohemians will start as favourites too," he says "and when we played them a few weeks ago they played us off the park.

"We worked very hard, though, and got the draw. You never know what might happen this time around."