Emmet Malonefinds Lee Carsley delighted to be back where he belongs as part of the Ireland set-up and relishing the prospect of the new Premiership campaign.

Bill Shankly famously declared that if Everton had been playing at the end of his garden he'd have drawn the curtains. And when you reach the club's Bellefield training ground his home overlooked, it quickly becomes apparent the indifference is mutual; nobody I ask while waiting for Lee Carsley to arrive seems to know which of the nearby houses was Shankly's.

Set snugly in the middle-class suburb of West Derby, Bellefield is still well maintained but clearly quite dated and Everton will move to a distant but much bigger and more modern training ground in the coming weeks.

If the rumour mill was to be believed over the summer they were gearing up to relocate without Carsley, who was repeatedly linked with other clubs, notably Wigan, even after signing a new one-year deal.

It's the first thing I ask him about and he laughs off the suggestion that he might have been offered in part exchange for the left back Leighton Baines, whose first appearance at Bellefield has caused something of a stir on the day we meet.

Carsley admits there were offers from other clubs but insists the delay in resolving his future was entirely down to David Moyes and himself simply failing to get around to hammering out a deal both knew would be done.

After a top-six finish last May and a couple of promising buys, Everton have high hopes for the months ahead, but, Carsley says, "We're aware that we usually follow a good season with a bad one and we're conscious of the need to avoid doing it again."

Having seen his stock rise steadily at Everton since arriving in the wake of being relegated with both Blackburn and Coventry, the midfielder clearly relishes the prospect of another campaign.

His best season to date was 2004/2005, when he scored the winner in a Merseyside derby and played a key role in the team's fourth-place finish.

Having steered clear of strong drink and taken excellent care of himself, however, he reckons he still has another couple of good years ahead of him on what he believes is the game's greatest stage.

"I think it (the money) has helped. It (the game) is so much faster and the emphasis is so much more on attacking now. Sometimes I sit at home and watch all the old games and it just strikes me how much quicker the games are now and how much more entertaining.

"It's basically become one of the best spectacles in the world."

Nor does he feel the flow of cash has resulted in unhealthy restrictions on competition, even if breaking into the top four now looks a daunting prospect for those looking up from below.

"It shouldn't mean that. I remember when Chelsea were first spending all the money and people said, 'Oh no, they'll just win the league every year,' but it hasn't happened. Man United have caught up with them and now everybody else has to work harder to catch up with the two of them and that's good for everyone in the end.

"From a personal point of view I love it. When I see on the TV that Chelsea or Man United have bought some fantastic player I just think that I can't wait to play against them because to pit your wits against players like that is a great privilege.

"I think the only drawback to it is that the fans don't feel as though they have as much in common as they used to with the average footballer, which is poor but it's just one of those things that's a reflection of society as a whole really.

"I mean, you can't really justify £100,000 a week and all this business when my brother, for instance, will get £15,000 a year bricklaying. It's outrageous," he concludes before adding with a grin, "I don't know if he's actually on that, by the way."

Carsley certainly comes across as more grounded than most in the game these days. He started as an apprentice at Derby when aspiring professionals still had to do some real work. And the diagnosis of his second son, Connor, with Down's syndrome had the effect of puncturing the cocoon in which most footballers live.

"When we first had Connor obviously it was a big shock, and when you find yourself in a lot of hospital waiting-rooms with maybe 50 or 60 people who are all in the same boat as you it does bring you down to earth with a bump."

Seeing his son go on to do well since at the mainstream school he attends with his brother, Calum, and sister, Lois, has been hugely rewarding for Carsley. But wary of unsettling the nine-year-old, he and his wife, Louisa, agreed the family would stay in Birmingham wherever his playing career took him.

When the conversation strays to the subject of the city's divided loyalties and the insistence of Evertonians that theirs is the club of the local population, he suggests his combination of city-centre stay-overs and long commutes to home provide him with unique insights on the issue.

"My apartment is in the city centre so I'm literally in the thick of it and you don't realise till you live here in the heart of the city how much Everton FC means to the people.

"And then," he continues, the grin starting to break through, "when I travel home to Birmingham you see a lot of fans going down the M6 with their red and white . . . so I reckon a lot of them are Brummies."

He grew up in the city himself but thanks to his mother Margaret's roots in Cork always felt Irish deep down, a fact that compounded the hurt he felt when belittled by sections of the media here after the Republic's drawn game against Russia back in September 2003.

The attitude toward the English-born players, he believes, was always different; he cites journalists seizing on Irish-born teenagers as "the next big thing" or, more specifically, "the next Roy Keane", when sometimes, he observes, it was obvious the lads in question really did not merit such hype.

Asked later about Keane and his recruitment policy at Sunderland, Carsley good-naturedly laughs off the suggestion he might have been approached about a move to the northeast before observing ruefully, "Maybe I'm not Irish enough for him."

He leaves little doubt, however, about his own sense of identity: "I played for the Three Cs (Catholic Community Centre) from the time I was nine until I was 16. Our strip was the green and white hoops like Celtic, and definitely, we were the real thing, the Irish team, which is absolutely the way I thought of myself."

His father, Frank, played professionally too: "A jinky wee winger he was, so a stewards' enquiry might be necessary into my precise relationship to him," he laughs.

Like every other kids, he says, he wanted to go past defenders and score goals. "But even at 12 I was the sort of lad who people would always look at and say, 'Eh, that was a good tackle.'

"I was strong and scored the odd goal but basically even then I was somebody who stopped the other team's best player and prevented them building any momentum.

"The fact that I got so much encouragement," he laughs, "probably sums up why English football isn't very good."

His modesty and self-deprecation, though, don't reach daft proportions. Nor does he pretend to have fluked his way into the Premier League any more than he believes anybody else has done so: "It's not luck that a player is playing there. Clubs have the money so they get the best and every year the standard gets higher and higher.

"It's going to be more and more difficult for players to learn the game, because while they're trying to learn, the game is kicking on, and it definitely passes more of them by.

"I mean there are a lot of fantastic players, some of them hugely promising young lads, who play really well on the training ground, but you put them in front of a crowd and, you know, they can't do it. They may as well have stayed in the house."

Carsley, on the other hand, applied himself relentlessly and seized the opportunities that came his way. Hotel room-mates in the Ireland squad would speak, years later, of having woken up to find him exercising on the floor beside the bed, and even now he says he enjoys the work involved.

Word of his progress at Derby quickly got around and, briefly, he found himself at the centre of an international tussle.

"I got a call-up to the England under-21s at the same time that I did for the Irish under-21s and Jim Smith (then Derby manager) kept telling me, 'You have to play for England.' But it didn't interest me one little bit.

"So I went to Portugal with Ireland, we got beat and there was a bit of messing around in the hotel afterwards. The next day there was a meeting and we were all told - I think Shay Given, Steve Carr and Mark Kennedy were there too - that we would never play for Ireland again. My girlfriend rang and asked how it had gone and I was saying, 'Yeah, brilliant, but I don't think I'll be going back, actually.'"

Regime change came to his rescue and Mick McCarthy recognised the young midfielder's worth even if he was already well served in the centre of the park. Carsley liked the manager but was frustrated by having to sit out all but a minute of Ireland's four games in Japan and South Korea.

"I never meant to come across like I was complaining really but I had two young kids at the time and I was getting a bit of earache down the phone. It wasn't like I was having a great tournament; it was like, "Yeah, it's great, I watched another game."

He soldiered on but believed he had no alternative but to walk away in the wake of the reaction to the Russia game.

"I needed a break and to reinvent myself in the eyes of the Irish public. To show them that I could play. I just might not be a right-winger . . . a wee jinky man," he adds with laugh.

His return to the international fold late last year, as it turned out, was to be as much media-inspired as had been his departure, Steve Staunton coming under sustained pressure to recall the midfielder after Ireland's humiliation in Cyprus.

"It was strange all right," remarks Carsley of the shift in attitude. "If you'd told me it was going to happen back when I was 24 I'd have told you you were mad, but the longer you're in the game the more you learn to accept what goes on."

Now, at 33, he is philosophical about the past and positive about the future. He will, he says, play for club as well as country for as long as he can, "without making myself look stupid", after which he may or may not "fall into management" using the badges he is working toward.

First up, though, there is the matter of this afternoon's home game against Wigan. After which he might get the chance to watch Villa against Liverpool.

What better way to wind down, after all, than a Birmingham derby?