UEFA EUROPA LEAGUE TOTTENHAM v SHAMROCK ROVERS, TOMORROW, 8.05:IT'S SUNDAY afternoon in Tallaght where he has just scored one and laid on another in his side's 5-2 win over Bray, but it's afterwards when the fans have gone, and Shamrock Rovers have started their preparations for the midweek trip to London, that it becomes apparent the Rohan Ricketts show comes in many forms.

In the few short weeks since arriving in Ireland the midfielder had already done enough to suggest he is a cut above most of the players around him when it comes to working with the ball at his feet. Manager Michael O’Neill describes him as someone who can “make things happen in the last third of the pitch”, and certainly his movement, vision and in particular passing when pushing forward, are all of a standard rarely seen in the game here. But then, he is a product of the Arsenal school of football who subsequently won young player of the year down the road at Tottenham so there should be no surprises there.

His current level of fitness, both he and his boss acknowledge, is not quite what it might be but these are early days, he insists. Ricketts has arrived late in a transfer window that looked set to pass him by and with each passing game he feels a little sharper. He will, he predicts, become “quicker, more explosive”, thanks in part to the extra training he has been doing.

After a stint in his company you’d wonder where he gets the time. Ricketts loves to talk and for much longer on Sunday than anyone had anticipated the assembled media have a good time listening. He quite likes writing too and has combined the two into a media career on the side that is impressive mainly for its hugely varied nature.

What started as a bit of banter with the blessing of Toronto FC’s press department gradually turned into both TV and radio work in Canada but after that came a blog, his own website, eventually a rather eclectic ezine and now an e-book, Passion for Football, which is marketed through iTunes and Amazon and intended to serve as a “how to” for anyone contemplating a career in the professional game.

Given what appears to be an irrepressibly upbeat nature, you’d imagine the book, which draws on a mixture of personal experience and interviews with players he has known – Mark Bright and Darren Bent are among those who feature – must be positive stuff.

Ricketts, though, has more than enough cautionary tales to fill a decent sized volume and his spell in Dublin is, he admits, partly down to an attempt to rebuild a reputation that has been damaged in different ways by spells in the MLS as well as, far more pointedly, Hungary and Moldova.

He mentions, without any attempt to hide his exasperation, the experience of arriving back from Canada to discover that, as far as most of the Championship managers he hoped might sign him were concerned, he might as well have been on Mars for a year.

Having left Spurs, he had a stint at Wolves then drifted to the margins in England. At least things went relatively well in Toronto.

In Hungary, he played one game for Diosgyori VTK’s first team, who were relegated and stopped paying him well short of the season’s end. And his time with FC Dacia in Moldova made that ill-fated sojourn seem like a golden era.

“Everyone says: ‘Why don’t you sign in England? Why? You’ve still got it’. And I say; “It’s not as simple as just signing back in England or I would have been there.

“I still keep the belief that I can still play at the top level and that when the opportunity comes and I have a stormer of a game or I score a goal at White Hart Lane, things can change but at the moment (I’m just grateful that) this manager and Jim Magilton have put faith in me.”

In Hungary, he recalls with considerable humour: “It was testing times. The coach didn’t want to sign me so you’re always batting against the coach. You don’t get paid your salary, the team is bottom of the league and you’re not getting on.

“You’re living two hours outside of Budapest . . . two hours outside. No English. It was a little village and I’m in there, like this. ‘Do you know where Tesco is?’ Basic questions like that. And they’re not looking.

“The only people that were happy to see me were babies. Yeah, they were happy to see me.”

His experience in Moldova is detailed in a remarkable blog for his ezine, column10.com and the dispute with Dacia is now in the hands of the PFA and Fifa. Suffice to say, though, a stint in Ireland with a club of modest but stable means that are playing Europa League football – and against his old club, Spurs, at that – seemed far too good to resist.

“I’m a realist,” he says, “and at the moment, it’s really difficult just to get clubs. I could play a few good games and people will be like: ‘Ah he’s a really good player’, but only a few weeks ago I was looking, struggling to get a club. I wasn’t not performing but the market has changed. The economy is struggling, everyone’s budgeting.

“Now you go to a club (he had stints at Stevenage and Southend during the summer before Rovers got in touch) and they’re looking at you and looking at you. It’s like they’re waiting for you to make a mistake. That was very difficult. So when I just got signed, forget Europe and the possibility of winning the league and joining a team that were champions last year, I was just happy to be signed.

“People think footballers have it all made for us but it’s not so easy, especially in this climate. There is a five to 10 per cent bracket where you might say these guys are made. The rest are fighting for their next contract.”

He was once, he admits, a part of the five to 10 per cent, playing first in a strong FA Youth Cup-winning team at Arsenal then the first team at Spurs where he initially excelled, but he allowed the opportunity to slip due to youthful ill-discipline and bad company.

“I came from nothing so it was tough and I had to work hard,” he recalls when asked about the early days under Liam Brady at Arsenal.

“I was just a very diligent person, staying focused but then you start being too friendly and spending time with the wrong people.

“Suddenly you’re not doing what got you there,” he says of the days when he had found fame at White Hart Lane.

“I think that was a small part, one of the ingredients, to my decline. I can point the finger at other people but I can look at myself too so going away allowed me to grow up and become wiser, calmer, just to appreciate things and have more balance, do you know what I mean?”

Life now, he says, is good, “a blessing” in fact. He lives with goalkeeper Ryan Thompson, who he clearly likes.

“He cooks for me, I eat for him,” he beams but he hasn’t lost his hunger for a second shot at the big time and reckons a good night tomorrow in north London might just be for starters.