Sitting in a Dublin hotel where he was attending a press lunch intended to kick off the build-up to Sunday's Harp Lager FAI Cup final, Stephen O'Brien was beaming across the table. On the other side sat a journalist who had mentioned in a recent piece for a Longford programme that the club's goalkeeper could count himself a little fortunate to have been named in the Players' Football Association of Ireland team of the year.
"Everybody's entitled to their opinion," grinned O'Brien. "Everybody's entitled to their opinion," he chortled again, as his quarry tried desperately to joke his way out of a very uncomfortable corner.
Like most goalkeepers, O'Brien is said to be a bit of a confidence player and before the game when the piece appeared there was a little concern it might throw the 30-year-old slightly. These days, though, you get the feeling it would take a bit more than that to rob the Dubliner of the spring apparent in his step of late.
A former youth international who had a spell at Gillingham before settling into English nonleague football, O'Brien was probably deprived of a much more high-profile career by his height which is, for a goalkeeper, disappointingly short of six feet. Still, the infectiously cheerful Dubliner insists football has been good to him and never more so since he joined Stephen Kenny at Longford Town which, he admits, seemed three years ago like a home for footballing misfits.
"Obviously everybody wants to be a big star in the game and earn four or five grand a week but I realised early on that that wasn't going to happen for me and was lucky to have enough of a head on my shoulders to make the most of what I could do," he says.
"I have absolutely no complaints about any of it now. I have a good job because of a good friend I met through football and I'm able to do that while playing as well so, even though I didn't make it in the way every kid hopes they will, I've had a very good life out of the game."
When O'Brien and his wife, Yvonne, moved back from England five years ago Damien Richardson brought him to Tolka Park. However, he says, he knew from early on he wasn't going to displace Alan Gough at the club and so, after 18 months, he travelled to Strokestown Road for the first time to meet up with Kenny.
"I'd have to admit that the first time I went up there I was probably thinking, `what have I got myself into here?', because we all just looked like a collection of rejects, myself included.
"But Stephen knew what he was doing and between fellas who hadn't been able to make it at other clubs and players from junior and intermediate leagues who he thought was good enough, it all started to gel pretty quickly."
After a long season during which O'Brien has been one of Longford's most impressive performers, the club has to go one better by beating Bohemians at the fourth attempt on Sunday. No one at the club is under any illusions about how tough it will be to beat of the newly-crowned league champions. However, he points out, being rated the underdogs suited them when they came up against Cork City and St Patrick's Athletic in earlier rounds.
"We've done enough to deserve to be in this final," he says, "and now we're there nobody should make the mistake of thinking we're going along just for the day out."
