It was a chilly Wednesday night in Whitehall this week as Ashtown Villa, once briefly the most feared of the FAI's giant-killing acts, completed the centrepiece of their preparations for the first round of this year's FAI Harp Lager Cup.

A practice game against Home Farm Everton ended in a 1-0 defeat and looking at players in action for the non-league outfit over the closing stages it was difficult to imagine a repeat of their 1991 antics which made the club the footballing equivalent of the bogey men throughout the National League.

Things, of course, are much different now for the club that was formed by the amalgamation of two northside outfits, Ashtown United and Villa Park Rangers, only 11 years ago. At the time, the reasons behind the merger were clear to everybody involved. The current club secretary, Brian Kenny, recalls: "Well, put simply, we had the land and they had the money. . . so we decided to see if we could make more of a go of it as a single club."

Progress might, indeed should, have been slow, but down at Tolka Rovers there was some trouble brewing and when Tony O'Connell, then that club's first team manager, inquired about switching to a club that already had two of his nephews on the committee, well, there wasn't really a lot to argue about.

O'Connell changed the face of the club dramatically. Just about the whole first team squad came with him from Rovers - a side that had won the FAI Junior Cup the previous season and one capable of bringing Villa, who up to this time had been making steady progress up the divisions of the Athletic Union League, on to new heights rather more quickly than had been anticipated.

Success at their own level came virtually immediately but it was the following year's FAI Cup when people outside the local scene began to notice. The club was drawn against Dundalk in the first round and, in a nightmare weekend for league clubs (Monaghan, Bray and Home Farm all went out to non-league opposition too) they went up there and won 1-0. A few weeks later they travelled to the Brandywell and beat Derry City 2-1. That meant the quarterfinals and a trip to Kilkenny with many, by now, treating them as favourites and already talking confidently in terms of a nonleague team going one step beyond what St Francis had achieved in 1990 just 12 months later.

"There was a great buzz around the place," recalls O'Connell, now the president of Bohemians. "We were travelling all over the place, which is nearly always the case for clubs from outside the league because even if you drawn at home you don't have a ground that's up to the standards, and everybody was getting very excited." In league circles there was public admiration for what a virtually unknown club was achieving and private bitterness that a group of players who were, in many cases, believed to better paid than their league counterparts, were masquerading as underdogs.

"Travelling expenses," O'Connell says quickly when the subject of pay is mentioned to him. "The players were training a lot and they were entitled to their out-of-pocket expenses, which we gave them." But whatever form the handing over of cash took, there is little dispute about what the overall effect was.

"People thought there was a lot of money floating around the club," says Brian Kenny, whose family have been centrally involved with the club since its foundation. "But it was more around the players than around the club itself."

That year's run ended with a quarter-final defeat in Kilkenny and not long afterwards Bohemians swooped for O'Connell. That meant, in effect, that the break up of the team was inevitable and Villa was forced to settle into a somewhat more run of the mill existence in the Leinster Senior League. "Well, they haven't done anything like that cup run again, but they've always been a credit to this league," says LSL Chairman Charlie Cahill. "Like a lot of other clubs they're very ambitious and have excellent facilities that they have plans to improve over the coming years and so I think the people who are running the club now have a lot to be proud of."

And so they are. Brian Kenny's brother Harry, an outstanding player himself during his long career at Shamrock Rovers and a cup final goalscorer in 1987, has further strengthened his family's ties with the club by taking over as team manager and bringing another brother, Alan, with him from Kinvara Boys.

Harry, or "H" as he is known throughout the game, has, like O'Connell, a successful business career outside football but unlike his predecessor not so successful yet that he's in a position to make Villa a particularly attractive place to be for the Dublin's best players. "There's no money really," he admits, "so every summer it's a question of going out and selling the club to the players I want." In Leinster Senior League terms he has done well, but as Wednesday night highlighted there are limitations to what he can be expected to achieve. The game against the first division side was organised to give Villa's players a chance to work off some of the Christmas excess and give Home Farm Everton's youngsters a taste of the rough and tumble they might expect from Workman's/Dunleary tomorrow. "Overall I'm happy with the way it went," the quiet-spoken Villa manager said after the match. "There was a difference between the two teams, but you're going to get that. There isn't much of a gap between our league and, maybe the bottom half of the first division, but there is a difference, probably in attitude as much as in the actual levels of skill, and that has a habit of coming through."

The club has drawn Leinster Senior League leaders Cherry Orchard in this weekend's first round rather than one of the country's really big names. "Well, it's the worst thing that could happen because we're at home," said Kenny, "so there's no real expense involved and there's a real chance for us to go through so we could still get to play somebody like Cork or St Patrick's or (with a glint in his eye) Rovers."