FAI Cup final countdown: Emmet Malone talks to the Waterford player-manager about finally reaching an FAI Cup final and his ambitions.

On Monday, as they mingled with the media at a Carlsberg-organised reception to mark the start of FAI Cup final week, Waterford United player-manager Alan Reynolds and the couple of players who had travelled to Dublin with him looked to be enjoying the attention that the club's first appearance at this stage of the competition in 18 years has brought them.

By Wednesday, though, life in the newly-acquired spotlight was starting to take its toll on preparations for Sunday afternoon's game and squad members were declared off limits.

For Reynolds, the scale of the attention has come as a surprise but as his first season in football management draws nears its end he's getting used to having to cope with the unexpected challenges that his new role presents on an all-too-regular basis.

Just about everything about the job is new to him, in fact, but after years of missing out as a player learning to cope with the build up to a game like Sunday's is one of the more enjoyable learning curves he has encountered.

"I missed out three times at the semi-final stage before," he says, "twice with Waterford and once with Cork City so to make it all the way this time was a huge relief, a wonderful feeling. It would have been great to make it to a final as a player and brilliant to bring a team to a final as a manager but the way it's turned out I feel I'm getting both in one go and I'm very excited about it all."

Reynolds spent a good deal of his career with United before leaving for spells with Longford Town, Cork City and Shamrock Rovers and it is that spell away he now points to as having provided him with the experience that has been a key factor in enabling him to hit the ground running as a manager.

"I went for the challenge," he recalls. "We'd been relegated and I stayed around to see whether we could get back up at the first attempt but when it didn't happen and Stephen Kenny came in for me I felt that I should go out there and try to prove myself as a player again at a Premier Division club.

"Looking back on it now it made a huge difference to me and the way I developed. I think I got to the stage where maybe I felt I was a big fish in a small pond here and it helped me to be in a different environment.

"From the management point of view it was brilliant to see how the likes of Stephen, Martin Lawlor, Liam Murphy and Liam Buckley operated. I came back with a lot of strong ideas about how I wanted to do things and that's been the basis for what I've done here with United this season."

Financial and other constraints ensure the situation is less than ideal at the club which has a mix of full and part-time professionals, a few of whom are based outside the city and don't, therefore, get to attend every training session.

"The lads are all amazingly committed, you really couldn't ask anymore of them," he says. "But the thing about having five or six full-timers is that you really don't get the full benefit out of them at all. What you really need to have is 12 or 14 full-timers or you almost might as well have none but the way things are now if you can't offer the likes of Daryl (Murphy) and Dan (Connor) full-times contracts then you're going to lose them so it's a difficult situation."

If United win on Sunday then Reynolds is hoping he might persuade his chairman to let him make the leap to a full-time set up during the close season but Ger O'Brien was cautious about the prospect yesterday, observing "it is unlikely that anything would be decided on the basis of winning just one game".

He added that nothing would happen until "we could see where the required money would be coming from well into the future".

Reynolds, having taken a two-year career break from Waterford Crystal in order to devote all his energies to United, is pragmatic enough to realise his ambitions might take a little longer to realise than he would like but, he insists, he is ambitious for the club and determined to build on a solid first year that is also set to end with a mid-table Premier Division finish.

A win on Sunday, he hopes, would speed the process by making O'Brien's task of raising funds that little bit easier. But then there is another reason, he says with a laugh, in which the outcome is vital. "If we lose they might sack me."