It's been a hectic week up at the Golden Ball where Wayside Celtic have been preparing to launch their latest assault on the Harp Lager FAI Cup. Memories of the beating they took at the hands of St Patrick's Athletic at Belfield a few years ago still linger. And as the club's manager, Peter Lennon, runs his players through their paces for the last time, there's a determination that it's not going to happen to them at Richmond Park tonight.

If Wayside do lose it'll be their first defeat in 18 outings this season and so their season won't exactly be over. "Anyway," says Lennon, "not reaching this stage of the competition didn't seem to do us any harm over the past couple of seasons because we won the league, the Leinster Senior Cup and a couple of Charlie Cahill cups."

Getting a run out in the senior cup is nice, appears to be the message, but these guys have smaller fish to fry.

For some of Lennon's players tonight's game will be a first opportunity to play at Richmond, but for the club's most recent recruit, Alan Byrne, it's a surprisingly swift return to the scene of what may well prove to be his last brush with the National League's leading clubs.

Frustrated with his limited opportunities to play first team football at Bray, Byrne (30), decided it was time to go. He felt a couple of weeks' training with St Patrick's went well but, for a variety of reasons, nothing came of the trial. A switch to Wayside, where his father once coached the reserves, his brother Colm has just started coaching and his other brothers, Mark, Paul and Jason, all play seemed the obvious move.

"The club has always been there for our family," says Byrne. "My dad was with them, my mother's from Kilternan and I've known a lot of the lads going back years, so really it's like a natural home to me."

It is, he concedes, likely to be his last one as a player for, dogged by his reputation as one of the game's hard-men and not as fit as he once was, there are unlikely to be any more offers from clubs like Bohemians, Shamrock Rovers and Shelbourne, where Byrne spent much of his career.

The midfielder insists that the name he got during that time for being a dirty player is unfair. "Nobody was ever carried off after one of my challenges, whereas I've seen plenty of fellas go in to take the player out.

"But when I came back from playing up north (he was at Linfield and Newry Town) even referees who wouldn't have been around when I played here before seemed to be on the lookout for me. "The other thing that happened, though, is the game changed a bit. I was always someone who liked a bit of give and take in terms of challenges, but these days you get away with a lot less, the pace of the game has picked up." After a career which, he says, he can "only say good things about", he's not complaining now. "I'm enjoying life up at Wayside where the lads train hard but basically go out there to enjoy themselves."

The idea is that they'll enjoy themselves tonight, although no one in the camp is exactly predicting an upset. "It's a good team and they've done well over the past few seasons so we've no reason to be scared of anyone.

"And whatever happens, it's good for the club. It's good that it gets talked about and written about in the papers. Even if you go out to the team that goes on to win it, it's not so bad to be able to say that you lost to the eventual winners." That's not, he's quick to add, the gameplan for this evening.