Leaving the league champions midway through last season was a frustrating decision for Brian McKenna to have to take, but now, as he heads into his first full season with Finn Harps, the prospect of regular football at a club with serious ambitions of its own has made the move look like an inspired career decision.

There is a bit of a cloud hanging over the Harps camp, with everybody still asking players about how the Cup was lost in May. But, come Saturday, when Cork City arrive in Finn Park, that defeat will be consigned to the record books, and the club will be able to get on with achieving what would have been wrapped up before the summer break if it hadn't been for Bray: qualification for Europe and a long overdue second piece of silverware.

The squad has been strengthened, with a couple of more signings expected over the coming weeks. But, of course, so have other squads, and McKenna admits it is a case of hope rather than expectation running high around Ballybofey.

From his point of view, though, the build-up to this season has been far preferable to last summer's closing weeks when, despite St Patrick's Athletic buzzing with talk of Celtic, sell out crowds and Europe, McKenna knew that Trevor Wood, rather than he, would be on the field at the kick-off. "I wouldn't knock my time at the club, because they were good times. There's a great bunch of lads there and it's a wonderful club, but it did get very frustrating, knowing that I was never going to get a game.

"In the end the chance to come up to Finn Harps came along, and the idea of playing regularly was too much to resist. And Harps were a good side, too. I knew that they had the sort of players that could go on to win things, and I'm hoping that we'll prove that to people this year, especially after what happened in the Cup final."

The optimists at the club put that defeat down to a bout of character building which will stand to them over the months ahead. But how well they have shaken off the disappointment will quickly become apparent in this year's championship which Harps kick off with games against Cork, Shamrock Rovers, St Patrick's and Shelbourne.

"Everybody's saying that the winners are going to come from last year's top three, and the way things have gone here, with building up squads and signing better players than before, they'd all have to be the favourites.

"But that implies that we're just there to make up the numbers and we don't see it like that at all. Last year, we reckon, we would have gone on and finished third fairly comfortably but for a bit of a run of injuries towards the end of the season. In the end, we finished up with fourth place and as Cup finalists, and the aim for the current season is to do better than that."

For McKenna the fact that he is playing regularly is only the most obvious change in his circumstances since leaving Richmond Park. The Dubliner now has to make seven-hour return journeys to home games and train either with Ashbourne or by himself.

"The training situation isn't the best, but actually it's a sign of how things are getting better here. A few years ago it would have been easy to link up with a league club, but now they all have bigger squads, which you need if you're going to get here these days.

"Because of that, having an extra goalkeeper showing up for training, which used to be handy for everybody, is a bit of a pain now because he's just one more player who has to be accommodated."

It's a price that McKenna is willing to pay as he looks to secure a future more settled than his recent past. Two years at Brighton, during which a hernia problem was not properly diagnosed and went untreated for almost six months, ended with the Irishman playing just one competitive first team game.

Back at home, he played two years at Belfield Park before moving on to Limerick, where a contractual dispute kept him out of the game completely for six months. After a spell at Monaghan United, Brian Kerr brought him to Inchicore where things initially went well enough until a knee injury cost him his place in the side.

"I wouldn't wish the contractual stuff on anybody, but the injuries, they're just part of the game," he says as he reflects on it all. "There were a couple of rough patches, but overall it's been good . . . and it'd be a lot better if we win something and qualify for Europe this season."