For many of those he meets at Tolka Park, his departure and the way it came about will overshadow his return but Pat Scully doesn't seem too concerned as he contemplates tonight's top-of-the- table clash between Shelbourne and Shamrock Rovers.

Some bridges, he admits, have been burned with little hope of reconstruction and when he talks about his former manager it is only to say that he doesn't have anything to say about "Mr Keely".

There are a couple of players he probably won't be taking time out to catch up with either. Having felt that he had no choice other than to leave after a deeply personal falling out with three team-mates last season, however, Rovers's central defender insists that life with the Hoops is pretty good just now.

The attraction of leaving a club widely fancied to regain the league title for one whose difficulties in building a new home has tended to overshadow its own traditionally lofty ambitions wasn't immediately obvious over the summer months. But when his dissatisfaction at Tolka Park became known a queue of rival managers formed hoping to present a suitable alternative.

The fact that his former boss at Shelbourne, Damien Richardson, was presenting the case for Rovers was, of course, a major factor but Scully maintains that Joe Colwell's contribution and the plans both men mapped out for the club were a significant factor when it came time to make his decision.

"On the one hand," he says, "I felt that at 30 I'd already had a very good career and it wasn't the very long-term future that I was looking at. What Damien and Joe persuaded me of, though, was that Rovers would be the sort of new challenge that I wanted and that the way they saw the club going I could still finish my career on a high."

The implication, perhaps, is that the club's two leading figures foresaw the possibility of a championship win within two or three years. Instead, Rovers go into this evening's game with a bit of daylight between them and the chasing pack.

"Clearly everybody was disappointed by last season but I think the feeling virtually from the first day of pre-season training was that it was all in the past and that the important thing for us all was to look forward.

"It's natural, I suppose, that a lot of people looked at a club like Shelbourne who had added something like eight good players to what was already a very strong squad and reckoned that the league would be over by Christmas, that they'd just run away with it.

"All we were thinking, though, was that it was important to get a good start, to avoid getting sucked into trouble early on and, to be fair, things went very well those first few weeks so that by the time we did lose a game I think we all had enough confidence in ourselves not to let it unsettle us."

The team's consistency has been one of the surprises of the season, even if their generally more solid look at the back, reflected in the goals against column (only Derry City have conceded less), is not.

"To be honest, though, I don't think it's just a question of improving the defence. Everybody's worked very hard as a team to tighten things up and what's happened is that, between us, we've cut down the number of chances that other sides get against us by preventing them playing anywhere in the pitch - that's bound to make a big difference."

But an even more important factor is the feeling among the players themselves that they have not quite achieved what they might have at what is traditionally such a big club.

"I think there's a lot of fellas who came to Rovers because they felt they would be successful here and it hasn't happened. There's a real determination right through the squad to put that right now."

For Scully things may actually be running just a little ahead of schedule but if his new club can take another step towards completing the Rovers return against Shelbourne then he, for one, won't be complaining.