By all accounts Alan Maybury's first day in his new job went well on Saturday. He and his colleagues enjoyed a 3-0 victory over St Johnstone and Maybury endeared himself to his new employers with a couple of nice runs and one dishy dragback.

Canny jambos! Heart of Midlothian have got a bargain for the £150,000 sterling they spent on Maybury. Can the rest of the English Premiership be so teeming with smart, good-quality right backs that there was no place for an Alan Maybury there? Like Mick McCarthy (only more so), I will show my backside in Burton's window if that is truly the case.

"Alan's gone to the third-best team in Scotland," said Dave O'Leary with casual disregard for the truths of the Scottish league table. "We wish him well."

The third best team in Scotland (Hearts are eighth and "cash strapped") is not what Alan Maybury was reared for. A good start in front of 10,735 people in an inferior league at the age of 23 is not what he dreamt of.

There are players who you see play once or twice when they are young and you just take a liking to. You bore other people about them. You ask after their progress at every chance. You take an anorakish interest in their development which can sometimes lead to barring orders and bitterness. For this column Alan Maybury is one of those, one of the dauphins who you just wait to see coming into his kingdom so you can say that, well, you spotted him long ago.

There's not much credit in doing that with Alan Maybury, mind. He's a better player than his new job suggests he is. Always was.

He went from Home Farm to Leeds just before his 17th birthday but without the usual wide-eyed innocence. He was mature and clear-minded. "Not a Jack-the-lad at all," Brian Kerr said. "A very serious fellow about his football."

He has always been on the edge, fingertip-close to fulfilment. Four years ago he captained a talented Leeds youth team to a league and cup double. All the way up he looked like officer class material. He captained Irish schoolboy teams from under-15 level on up and when he won his first Irish senior cap it finished off his collection. He had been capped at every single level from nipper to senior. He crossed into what should have been the glory years.

Started well too. Three and a half years ago in the dusty Czech town of Olomouc Mick McCarthy sketched some plans. Maybury was part of the picture.

Olomouc is a quaint little town with one (fabulous) restaurant and the ideal place to throw some kids into the deep end. So McCarthy brought Alan Maybury, Robbie Keane, Damien Duff, Steve Carr, Graham Kavanagh, Mark Kinsella and Rory Delap along to see if they'd sink or swim.

Maybury played the first half at right back and played it well, vacating his post only to allow Robbie Keane to come on and Gary Kelly to drop back to his regular position. Keane was good, Duff was sublime, but if you'd been told that four of those kids would become first choices in the senior team, Alan Maybury's name would have been one of those you'd have put your house on.

Funny, but Steve Carr's wouldn't. Yet when George Graham left Leeds for Spurs not long afterwards Carr developed into a wonderful player under his tutelage. Maybury had a chance to gain ground at Leeds when Gary Kelly lost a season to a shin injury. Then Maybury got precisely the same injury and by the time he had recovered Danny Mills had Gary Kelly's job. Gary Kelly was kicking his heels. Alan Maybury was nowhere.

Hard to believe. If it wasn't for bad luck Maybury would have had no luck at all. Injuries. Management changes. Playing in a position for club and country where the queue is long and talented. If only he'd been a striker.

Yet back in Olomouc in 1998 he was on a roll. Graham had begun picking him at Leeds, he'd played for the Ireland B squad the previous month. When he came to open the Leeds United section in a sports shop that February a clatter of us hacks turned up to meet him. He was the next big thing.

His last game for the club was against Lazio in the Champions League late last season. He returned to the first-team squad at Elland Road this year but playing time was always going to be sparse. So he's ended up at Hearts, one of those paths young players have to take just to keep drawing a pay packet from the game. World Cups are funny things. In November 1993 when Ireland flew back from Belfast having been hoisted by Alan McLoughlin's goal into the finals the names of Phil Babb, Gary Kelly and Jason McAteer wouldn't have meant very much to anyone on board. By the following summer they were the Spice Boys.

Next summer if Ireland get to the World Cup there'll be a motley crew on the team plane. A striker or two who couldn't score if they were let loose in a women's prison with a fistful of pardons, another couple of characters who in any other job would have boozed themselves onto the dole queue by now, a few lads who have had lucky breaks and last chances forced into their palms right along the way and the odd opportunist who would be toting an England kitbag if their dream had really come true.

Alan Maybury of Clontarf will be wondering. So will some others for whom opportunity hasn't knocked too loudly or persistently. There is a huge pool of players in their late teens and early twenties who'll be looking to have the spectacular season that might leave them scrapping for maybe one spare seat on that plane. Stephen Reid, Steve McPhail, Barry Quinn, Alan Quinn, Derek Geary, Keith Foy, Colin Healy will be thinking that way. Others like Graham Barret and Richie Partridge have great futures slipping away from them. Oh, and there's Keith O'Neill. Too sexy for his shirt.

Maybury has the toughest challenge of all. In terms of right backs Steve Carr, Gary Kelly and Steve Finnan represent an almost obscene richness of resources but if some quirk of fate were to get him onto that plane nobody could begrudge him his weeks in the sun.

Saturday was another first step at the bottom of another ladder for Alan Maybury. He deserves to reach a balcony sometime soon.