His status as an out-of-town part-timer may deprive him of the captaincy when Shelbourne take on Brondby here in tomorrow night's UEFA Cup qualifying-round first-leg, but Dermot Keely makes no secret of the fact that he will still be relying on newly-signed Peter Hutton to provide some much-needed on the field leadership against the accomplished Danish side.

The Shelbourne boss feels that it is a quality his side lacked at crucial moments during last year's ultimately barren campaign and believes the northerner's natural ability to provide it will go a long way towards enabling the club to regain the league title over the coming months.

For his part, Hutton insists that he has come to Dublin to win things. Impressed by Keely's own passion for success, the 28-year-old has not made life easy for himself by signing a 12-month contract at Tolka Park.

Back home in Derry, there is understandable frustration that a prominent coach on City's football in the community scheme has decided to play his own football elsewhere. Some relations, Hutton admits, have been strained and, unwelcome at the Brandywell, the player has been forced to cobble together a training routine that relies heavily on goodwill from the managements at Limavady and Finn Harps.

"It's a bit tense at the moment," says the versatile former City skipper, "and some of the things that people have said about me have hurt a bit. But the reality is that football's probably always going to be a bit like that and while I could have played another couple of seasons out, the offer of coming to Shelbourne came along and it looked very attractive. At the moment, though, the important thing for me is to try to keep it all very separate."

The former youth international's ability to slot into a variety of different roles appealed to Keely who will most likely rely on Hutton and Tony McCarthy to keep Brondby strikers Ruben Bagger and Mattias Jonson at bay tomorrow night. The new arrival insists that he doesn't care where he plays, however, as long as he keeps edging his way into his new club's starting line ups.

"There is an awful lot of competition here, which is probably what we missed most at Derry. Dermot said that the club was going to go all out for the league and told me some of the names he had in mind to bring in and I knew straight away that it would be tough but that it would be a real chance to win things again."

Already the owner of league, cup and league cup winners's medals, progressing a round in European competition is one thing that Hutton never achieved at City with three attempts producing only one home win and a couple of close-run things.

"These (Brondby) are probably better than any of the teams I've played against in the past but then Bohs and Shels have made a lot of progress over the past couple of years and helped build a lot of self-belief.

"A few seasons ago they might have looked at it and reckoned this would be easy but I think that's changed and we have to go into this game working on the basis that we're capable of getting either a draw or the away goal to really put ourselves in contention when the tie goes back to Dublin."

But for a hamstring injury to central defender Jim Gannon, another of Shelbourne's new men, Hutton would almost certainly have found himself partnering 21-year-old Davy Byrne in midfield, an arrangement that would have left both Pat Fenlon and Jim Crawford out in the cold.

As it is, Byrne is the only certain starter in the centre of the pitch with the two more experienced players left to hope for the best until Keely names his starting 11 this evening. It's quite a turnaround for the young Dubliner whose succession of injuries during a difficult year at Dundee United prompted his then manager, Paul Sturrock, to observe that the Irishman had come down with everything bar swamp fever.

Even Keely admits that it "would have taken the team bus crashing" for him to get picked last season, a view that the player himself had more or less formed for himself over the course of a deeply disappointing campaign.

Now, after a fine pre-season, the Shelbourne manager sees Byrne as central to his plans both this week and into the months ahead and Byrne maintains that he is finally delivering the sort of form he always felt he was capable of but often doubted he would ever reproduce.

"I thought of giving it all up, to be honest, just getting a job and getting out into the real world," he says. "But the way I've been playing in pre-season is the level I know I should be at and the more games I play the more I'll grow and grow and grow."

The intention is that tomorrow evening's game will give the youngster an opportunity to show any sceptics just how far he has grown already.