NATIONAL LEAGUE: League champions they may be but it is in off-the-pitch disputes that Shelbourne have established a really impressive unbeaten run over the past few seasons.

After a weekend, however, in which Pat Fenlon had probably earned himself a disrepute charge for his comments to the media and Ollie Byrne had made his by-now-customary threat to haul everybody off to the High Court, there were signs the Alan Cawley affair might just mark a change in the club's luck.

As of yesterday, there were no signs of the Tolka Park line on the controversy softening, but then you would hardly expect it to. Byrne, after all, has made a habit of screaming from the rooftops when he has felt aggrieved in the past and has made his club a tidy profit from it too.

Before Christmas the FAI paid the club €100,000 to settle a variety of outstanding claims by the Dublin club against them. Included in that list, apparently, was the refereeing error in last year's cup defeat by Sligo that spared Rovers a sending-off with a couple of minutes remaining, the legal costs of the Paul Marney case - though they were awarded against the club in court - and a reluctantly made contribution towards flood damage to Tolka Park.

At issue in the current dispute is whether close to €40,000 is due to UCD from Shelbourne in compensation for the club's role in developing Cawley.

By local standards it is a huge sum, enough to make the promising but unproven 22-year-old one of the most expensive signings in the domestic game's history and, after their recent financial troubles, coming up with the money would presumably be a struggle for the league champions.

At the heart of the conflict are differing interpretations of the league's rule 19.23. Shelbourne insist the rule's wording requires that Cawley have been a UCD player for two full seasons before compensation would be due and that he fell a few weeks short of this. UCD claim the midfielder was with the club for the full two seasons but that it doesn't matter anyway as the wording requires only that he have been there for part of the second season.

It is one of the case's many ironies that Roy Dooney, once Byrne's bête noire, intended changing the wording, in what would have been Shelbourne's favour, before being forced from office over the Paul Marney affair.

Michael Hyland, who was league chairman when a previous case involving Stuart Connolly's move from Athlone to Dundalk arose, agrees with Shelbourne's interpretation of the rule but, more significantly, one suspects, the league's legal advisers, A&L Goodbody, reckon UCD are on the firmer ground.

Not surprisingly, there is considerable sympathy around for the player who finds himself caught in the centre of all of this.

Equally predictably, though, there is little enough for Shelbourne. Fenlon's claim that he considered resigning when the club received a fax, three hours before kick-off on Friday, instructing them not to play Cawley is, amongst other things, viewed with a mixture of bemusement and consternation in Merrion Square, where it is felt that the club had to know already that it could not field a player whose transfer was the subject of a dispute.

And Shelbourne's own stated concern for the player would be easier to admire if they hadn't only last week made Ciaran Martyn pay the club around €7,500 compensation out of his own pocket for deciding to stay with Derry rather than honour a pre-contract agreement.

As it happens, their initial offer to Martyn was illegal under league rules but Byrne, who prides himself on his knowledge of the rule book, could justify the timing of his club's approach under the FAI's regulations. It was just the sort of move that has done much to alienate them from other league clubs over the years.

There have been other things that have generated ill will too, however, including Shelbourne's decision to oppose a proposed television deal that came before the league last year which Byrne felt didn't best suit his club's best interests. The vote on that occasion was 21 to one.

Sympathies will be divided in much the same proportions if, having done so well in the past out of living by the sword, Byrne is felled by it on this occasion.