With the week that's been in it, the new manager of Bohemians Football Club could, he sighs, probably do without the media attention right now.

His three days of training with the largely professional squad at his new club have gone well but all their preparations for this evening's trip to Longford for the FAI Cup second-round clash have been a little overshadowed by the legal dispute sparked by his sudden departure.

Deprived of a seat in the dug-out due to a court injunction he doesn't know what kind of a reception he will receive from the home supporters following his 31/2 years at Longford Town.

"Whatever happens," he says with a hint of sadness, "I'll handle it like a professional." So far the signals have been mixed with the tone of phone calls and messages he has received varying wildly. "One or two have surprised me all right," he says, "but I knew what I was doing when I made my decision so you just have to get on with it really."

Still there is a clear sense of disappointment that he feels portrayed as the only bad guy in the contractual debate. Longford's side of the story has been that a contract agreed some months ago went unsigned; his differs markedly with the terms of the written document handed to him, he insists, falling somewhat short of what had been originally agreed. Though reluctant to go into details he admits that the terms offered on paper might have been influenced by the fact that the team was going though a rough spell at the time and things "weren't all sweetness and light at the time". Even so, a provision allowing for either party to sever the agreement with just four weeks' notice did seem to rather defeat the purpose of signing up.

Nevertheless he arrives in his new job with good memories of his time with Longford, a club that had only very occasionally enjoyed good times as it stumbled along from one crisis to another prior to his arrival.

As he thinks back on it now, the early days are what spring to mind. Proudly introducing himself to people as Longford Town's new manager in pubs to almost invariably cool responses - he quickly realised that just about everybody with a business connection in the town was owed money, haggling over the price of sandwiches for his players at stop-offs to away games and the wheeling and dealing of assembling a squad of footballers with hardly any money at all.

Kenny's first game in charge was in the League Cup against a Dundalk side then managed by Jim McLaughlin. "I was 26 and I couldn't believe it and what was more we won." Better yet, Longford topped a group that also included Drogheda United and Monaghan and only went out of the competition in the end to St Patrick's Athletic on penalties. Not bad for a team that had been put together in weeks and for peanuts.

Stephen O'Brien played in the Dundalk game without ever having met the rest of the team. His arrival had initially been delayed by Shelbourne needing him as cover for their first choice goalkeeper in the European games against Rangers.

Dermot Keely then wanted to allow him leave Tolka Park on a free transfer but the club wanted a fee (£400) and Kenny was at first told that the club couldn't afford him.

A year later he was told the same thing when he sought to buy Richie Parsons and Robbie Coyle from Bray for a combined £2,500. "I went to the club's executive and was told that the money simply wasn't there," he says, "so after meeting Pat Devlin, who wanted £5,000 but said he'd settle for £2,500 if we did it that day because he was going away on holidays that afternoon, I paid the money myself. We met in the Shelbourne Hotel and I remember we just went off and I got him the money."

Like a lot of the smaller bits and bobs - food for players before an away game, £30 a night for the use of the training ground in Celbridge and just about anything else you could imagine being needed to keep a low budget football team on the road - Kenny got just about all of the money back as a growing sense of professionalism started to take hold at the club and a new board, the men he left behind last week, came in to run things. There were, however, some hairy moments along the way.

"Mickey Cox, the chairman then, was a great guy - he's still involved now as head of the grounds committee - but there was no money and you had to fight for everything. We had blazing rows, incredible things. I remember shouting down the phone, hanging up and ringing back still shouting and Mickey, who did everything up there, would be screaming back at the other end.

"Anyway, during the promotion season we were due to play Kilkenny and Mickey came up to me and told me that there were no wages to pay the players, he said we'd have to tell them. I told him, 'there was no way you're going to tell them,' but his line was, I'd rather be straight with them because then the lads can decide whether to play or not before the game.

"I said there's no way. You can't tell them. Go and get them, go and get the wages and he's saying, 'how?, I can't get them,' but I was telling him, 'you have to'.

"Well I didn't hold out much hope because Mickey had probably put a lot of his own money in at different times to keep the thing going and he was saying that the money just wasn't there and maybe I was being a bit over the top about it but I really thought that that would be the end of it.

"If the players didn't get the money they'd all be free agents - it would have demoralised the whole thing. The thing was that the fellas weren't getting a whole lot out of it, they weren't well paid but I felt that if we ever broke that commitment, to get whatever they were supposed to be paid then it would be the start of a downward spiral and we'd never get it back up again. There'd be no going back from that.

"So there we were losing 1-0 to Kilkenny with 20 minutes to go and I'm thinking, right, that's it, it's over but we gave a good bash and along comes Mickey down the sideline saying, 'We got it! We got it!'

"He'd gotten it off two publicans and they had to get it back in. It was temporary money, but they got it. The lads - who didn't know any different - got paid and we got an equaliser."

It wasn't exactly the sort of stuff he'd dreamt of as a 12-year-old when he first realised that running teams rather than starring in them was where his future lay. He was captain of both the soccer and gaelic teams at Old Bawn Community School but had already started to sense that his outlook was slightly at odds with those around him.

"Even at that stage I'd be watching games with my mates and they just wanted to watch it but I'd be writing down formations, analysing what was going on and fellas would be saying to me, 'why do you care?'

During spells with the reserves at St Patrick's Athletic, Bluebell United (where he won an Intermediate Cup) and, eventually, Home Farm, he never changed and so when the chance came to work with Paddy Dempsey as a player-coach at Tallaght Town he grabbed it.

Everything since has tended to justify his self confidence and he points to the achievements at Longford with particular pride. "When I went there I said we'd be promoted within three years and we did it in two. Then I said we would qualify for Europe within another three years and we managed it at the very first attempt.

"That might sound like I'm boasting but it's not meant to. I had a very special bunch of players up there and I pushed them very hard but they'd almost all come from outside the league and were delighted to be playing in it so they put up with not really having lives outside of their jobs and football."

At Bohemians, where few of the players have the distraction of outside employment the reaction, he says, has been exceptional over these past few days and he is excited about the future. On Monday he set the bar high for his time at Dalymount, targeting a place in the group stages of the Champions League and establishing the club as Ireland's elite side in much the same way as Rosenborg have established themselves in Norway. By the latter part of the week, however, he is admitting that there are more pressing concerns.

"I know it'll be difficult just to win the cup or league. We have to win just to qualify for the competitions in the first place but we've got to have longer term goals and if people laugh then all I can say is that people laughed when I predicted what has been achieved at Longford and so far nothing's ever come back to haunt me."